File size of M$ Word Document increases when sent as attachment

[evac-q8r]

What's up?

I have a word document that was originally 56320 bytes (or 110 * 512 byte blocks) which was created on Windows and then I sent it as attachment to Linux system and filesize increased to 60416 bytes (118 * 512 byte blocks). Is this simply because of the difference in the way the two filesystems allocate storage space for an identical file.

This raises another question. Many file sizes (when checking with ls) is the exact number of bytes as there are characters that exist in the files (especially in the case of text files where one can easily count the number of chars) whereas these files (document files) are shown as a mulitple of 512 or 1024 byte sized blocks. Why does list seem to show the exact size of some files and the block usage of other files.

Thanks,

-EVAC

[Icarus]

It could be the difference in filesystems
How was the email sent from Windows, Outlook? Outlook does some phuny things when it send email, most common is when the reciever doesn't get any attachments except a winmail.dat because of how it handles attachments when sending.

I guess the real question would be did the document change in size or the email that contained it?

[evac-q8r]

Not sure which application sent it. It is Cox Communication standard e-mail client. So whatever that is. Not sure if the e-mail changed size or not because when I attached it the file was it's original size, but when I recieved it, the attachment was larger.

-Erick

[pezplaya]

I would say that the two filesystems allocate storage space differently.

I've had this happen to me, and I would doubt that your email client is going to go in and change your attachment.

[psych-major]

Just for fun, if possible, try moving the same document between the same two systems via the netpowrk or removable media. That would take the email clients out of the picture.

I used to see the same thing when I shared .doc files between M$ and Mac at school. So it's probably just file allocation.

[evac-q8r]

Just did what you said by using a 3.5" floppy diskette and file size remained identical to original. Maybe email client has something to do with increased file size. I dunno.

-EVAC

[psych-major]

It must be the tracking headers that Carnivore placed on the email attachment...

[paj12]

It probably is the email client. My mom routinely emails Excel spreadsheets where she works. On one spreadsheet, she emailed it to a coworker, the coworker made some changes and mailed it back, and the resulting file was over 200MB! FYI, the original file was <1MB. This is through Outlook between two Windows systems, so I doubt Linux has anything to do with this.

[Suramya]

could it be that the document got infected with a macro virus while being transmitted via email?

- Suramya

[heckle]

I may be wrong but I do think that the increase in file size is due to the way differernt mail clients and mail servers encode attached files and then decrypt them upon receipt. I think the encoding is called MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). And yes, anything beyond ASCII in the message body is transferred as an attachment.

[evac-q8r]

Heckle: I think that is possible. I was just reading about that as a matter of fact. The difference is approximately 4kBytes of information. I just don't know if that is a reasonable amount of additional information to describe to the MIME type because I thought that only required a few bytes if not bits of data.

-EVAC

[heckle]

I do not know about the total message size but I think it all depends on how the encoding is handled by the original mail program. Also, if we include M$ Exchange into the mix, the information store is nto the most efficient storage method. But, I do not know enough about the workings or the MIME or S/MIME format to make a guess about message sizes. I just remember back to the days of BBS's. We had zmodem, xmodem, ascii, etc... protocols that all worked a little differently and the block sizes were configurable as well.

[Chess007]

I uploaded a file to yahoo mail, to send as an attachment. I noticed it was bigger than the version of the file i had on my hd.

Then the file wouldn't work for who I sent it to. I've found its best to compress (i.e. .tar, .zip) a file before sending it. as when the file is uncompressed it maintains the file size of the original file.

Also, I tried to send multiple pictures as an atatchment (through yahoo mail) and it combined them all and arrived as a mime file at its destination.

[JohnT]

Try fowarding by copy and paste in to your client without the headers from the original message included.

[evac-q8r]

Originally posted by JohnT
Try fowarding by copy and paste in to your client without the headers from the original message included.

Just tried that. That seems to preserve the non-original file size. But that was after the original file size was increased. I forgot to mention that actually the file size increased from 56Mbytes to 82Mbytes while it exist as an attachment in the mailer and then when saved to disk it's file size drops back down to the previously mentioned 60Mbytes which is still larger than the original.

I don't know if your method (forwarding) works when sending the files as attachments for the very first time. Can you forward a message if it hasn't already been sent once before?

-Erick