It appears that attachments that are recieved are larger than actual file size. If a 8 MB file is sent to a user, the webmail interface shows the actual size to be 11 MB. This is a problem for our users that have a qouta set at 20 MB. We need to have a more accurate mail storage
count. How would we go about solving this issue. Is this a storage drive issue? If so, how so?
We had the same problem with iMS version 5.1 What version are you running?
We reported it to iPlanet supported who initially said that this is because all attachments are mime encoded.
After complaining to our support manager, they came back again and we were told that the Inbox doesn't display the size of attachments, it displays the total size of the message, including the overhead imposed by base64 encoding of attachments.
We were told that attachment and message size are different things and that the current behaviour is correct.
This was not the view of our users who were logging a lot of complaints about this. So we asked for a third time that they log this as a bug. They refused again and instead logged it as a Request for Enhancement - giving it a low priority since the current behaviour is apparently correct.
:)
The mail quota is for the size of your mail. If an 8MB attachment becomes 11MB after MIME encoding, that's how much disk space your mail takes-up. The mail server doesn't "decode" when it stores your mail, take a look at those xxxx.msg files. You should adjust mail quotas accordingly.
The only oddness, I can see is that the Messenger Express web-based interface appears to use 1024 for a Kilobyte. Most people, don't know that 1K can be 1000 or 1024 bytes. My Netscape mail client shows the actual number of bytes of the entire mail message.
That's a lot of disk space overhead.I would rather the attachments me decoded to their original file size. My customers simply won't buy the encoding story. My Exchange 2000 and Lotus Notes servers reflect this information porperly.
Then again, it sounds like I will have to live with it and so will they until Sun does something.
