Have a problem where a customer emails a 16mb test.zip attachment to someone.

and the server bounces the message.the server reads

 

"552 Failure Message exceeded limit 23045k/20480k"

 

Server is set to bounce after 20mb so the 16mb attachment should have worked fine.

 

I temporrariolly increased the max limit to 50mb and the message came through fine.

in the logs the server believed the message was really 23mb and when I recieved the attachment

it was only 16m.

 

is there any reason why this is happening?

Thanx

 

Yes this is normal, and confusing :-)

When an email client attaches a file, it first converts it to base64 encoding, this is because traditionally email can only contain 'ascii' printable text, so all the binary must be encoded or it would be lost in transmission.    The base64 encoding is 50% bigger than the original.  When you get the email at the far end your email client does the reverse...

And surgemail just sees the size of the actual message, it doesn't 'look in side it' to see that it's really an encoded file...

    ChrisP.

 

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