Issues with Mail.app and MobileME

[wahit]

Hi guys!

I have a weird problem with Mail.app! I'm using this software with my MobileME account, and an error occurs when I send mails with attachments. I'll give an example:

Imagine that I want to send an e-mail to someone, and I want to attach a 10MB file to it. When I do that, the e-mail takes quite some time to send, because I'm not sending 10MB but... 3 or 4 times more!

Exactly. This happens over and over again. The e-mail sent is always 3 or 4 times larger than the original e-mail. I've checked - and re-checked this - several times using iStat widget. If I send a 10MB e-mail, the total upload is going to be over 30MB!!!!!

What is happening here? What can I do to solve this problem?

Thank you for your help.

 

[jpvaz]

I've had the same issue but not in that proportion...

The worst i've noticed is sending a 8Mb attached file hat some how get's transformed into a 9 or 10Mb file... but i think this has something to do with me using the option to make attached files compatible with windows systems... (not sure on that)

 

[thithi]

Why not upload the file to your iDisk and send a link?

 

[MacBoobsPro]

Its not just with MobileMe. I have noticed this for years in Mail.app.

I regularly send loads of jpegs and PDFs out to clients everyday and in photoshop and the finder it will say the file is 1.2mb but drop it into Mail and it shoots up to around 1.5mb. Infact I am so used to it that I can pretty much predict how big its going to be before I drop the file into Mail. I have also noted that the bigger the file the bigger the difference, so a 5mb file might add another 1.2mb onto it.

Not sure why its happening but my guess its the windows friendly format thing.

 

[wahit]

Its not just with MobileMe. I have noticed this for years in Mail.app.

I regularly send loads of jpegs and PDFs out to clients everyday and in photoshop and the finder it will say the file is 1.2mb but drop it into Mail and it shoots up to around 1.5mb. Infact I am so used to it that I can pretty much predict how big its going to be before I drop the file into Mail. I have also noted that the bigger the file the bigger the difference, so a 5mb file might add another 1.2mb onto it.

Not sure why its happening but my guess its the windows friendly format thing.

What if I remove the 'windows friendly' option? Will it send the e-mail perfectly anyway to Windows users?

 

[MacBoobsPro]

What if I remove the 'windows friendly' option? Will it send the e-mail perfectly anyway to Windows users?

I have no idea. A JPEG is a JPEG to me why it needs to be 'friendly' im not sure. Give it a go. If I recall some may be successful but some may not.

 

[bredell]

Attachments almost always get much larger than the actual files that are attached. This has nothing to do with Apple Mail or Mobile Me.

The mail standard, SMTP, is only capable of sending text. That's not entirely true, there are ways of sending binary (non-text) data as well, but usually we can't use them. So when a binary file is attached to en email, that file gets converted into text. The text version of the file is always considerably larger than the binary file stored on disk.

This is all a transparent process, the user is not supposed to see this. When you receive an email with an attachment, the mail program converts the attachment back to its binary form.

If you want to see the text version of an attachment, you can select an email with an attachment and choose the menu "View -> Message -> Raw Source". The attachment should now show as a long series of text lines. To go back to the original view you choose "View -> Message -> Original Content" from the menu.

 

[MaskingTape]

MobileMe (and IMAP accounts in general) are always saving draft copies of your emails, including attachments, to the server. That might be what you are seeing.

 

[wahit]

MobileMe (and IMAP accounts in general) are always saving draft copies of your emails, including attachments, to the server. That might be what you are seeing.

This only happens using Mail.app. If I send the same attachment through a browser the upload size is exactly the same size of the attachment, and not 3 or 4 times more

 

[pyrodex]

I've had the same issue but not in that proportion...

The worst i've noticed is sending a 8Mb attached file hat some how get's transformed into a 9 or 10Mb file... but i think this has something to do with me using the option to make attached files compatible with windows systems... (not sure on that)

This is due to the overhead of the converting of the file to plain text. You can reproduce this yourself by doing like

uuencode file.jpg file.jpg

(Not sure if uuencode is default in OSX)

This will produce the actually text that is stamped to the bottom of your email when you send an attachment. You could actually see this yourself if you could view the FULL headers of an email with an attachment.