I noticed this afternoon, that an email that I received from an outside company was listed in my Outlook as being 15KB, I forwarded this email to a colleague, making a few comments and he replied with a few comments of his own, both of us included the whole of the original email in our replies. The strange thing is that his reply is listed as being just 9KB, in spite of having two paragraphs of extra text in it thanks to our assorted comments.
How is this possible??
Further info that may or may not have any relevance - we’re both using Office 2000 on Windows XP with Exchange Server, and the email was in HTML format.
I have noticed similar behavior in Outlook2000 and 2002. We are running Exchange2000. My thought is that the header information may have shrunk and that would reduce the size.
However, I have had messages that had 3mb attachments, and forwarding these changed the size by 1/2 mb or so. We also limit our email accounts to 50mb, and after 50mb, users can no longer send messages. If one right clicks on OUTLOOK TODAY and chooses FOLDER SIZE, one can see that the size of their mailbox may seem to be greater than 50mb, though the system still let’s them send.
We’ve come to the conclusion that Outlook does not have proper sizing functionality. Some of the inconsistancy may be due to how Exchange stores the messages and such, but it is frustrating that we can’t get an accurate report on the size of a mailbox.
When sending mail over the internet from Outlook (as opposed to sending it to another user on the same server), the text is typically included twice: once in HTML and once in plain text for mail clients which cannot handle the fancier format. This is done using the “multipart/alternative” MIME type, which tells the receiving mail client to choose the most powerful encoding type it knows how to handle.
When you exchange mail with another user on the same Exchange server, only one format is used, either plain text or rich text, so that could explain why the forwarded message was smaller than the one you received. Also, I guess Outlook will use RTF rather than HTML in that case, which could also account for (a part of) the size difference.