[Lowfer] Message body is too big, size limit of 50 KB

[Doug Reed]

Cause: Message body is too big: 53241 bytes with a limit of 50 KB
Cause: Message body is too big: 68547 bytes with a limit of 50 KB

We're coming back into the "quiet" time of the year in North America
when LOWFER activity
booms. You may want to share your nightly screen captures with the
world. But I'll remind everyone that to successfully send an
attachment it is REQUIRED that the total message size be under 50KB.
And that 50KB limit probably counts all the address headers, MIME
attachments, and quoted text.

If you never send an attachment, the rest of this email does not apply
to you so you can stop reading.

If you use attachments, you should be aware that binary attachments
(like screen caps or pictures) are converted to MIME formatted text
before they become part of the email message. When you convert 8-bit
binary to 7-bit text, the file size grows by 15% or more. If your
attachment is 48KB in size, it grows to at least 55KB when converted
to MIME format in your email. This little detail probably explains why
attachments that are clearly under 50KB on your computer keep getting
bounced as too large for the LOWFER remailer.

So if you want to send an attachment, I recommend you reduce it to
40KB or less size as reported on your computer before you attach it to
the email. Hopefully this will eliminate the email bounces that
neither of us want to see. I *think* 40KB will be small enough to be
pretty reliable when sending an attachment, but if not, I would like
to hear about it so I can amend my suggested attachment size
limit..... Send to <lowfer-owner at mailman.qth.net> and I'll get the
email.

Also if you click REPLY to send the email, be absolutely certain you
trim the quoted reply text to the minimum before you send. It gets
very annoying to read through several replies to replies to replies to
old messages all stacked up in an email because the sender hit RELPY
but didn't trim the message text to the minimum required. It is even
worse if that person was getting DAILY DIGEST messages like many of us
do.

To trim your pictures, you can use the Microsoft Pictures program or
other tool of your choice. I prefer the free program XnView, but you
can find many other free programs that will do the job. The main thing
is to trim (crop) it to just the portion of the screen required, and
then choose the highest compression options that you can use to save
the resulting JPG file. You may find that converting to "low quality"
is required to get the best size reduction.

And if you make frequent use of attachments, I recommend you send an
additional donation to the guys at qsl.net to help pay for the
service. Every year around new year, the sysops send out an email
asking for donations to pay the cost of running the servers and paying
for the Internet bandwidth used by all the free services at qth.net
and qsl.net. None of it is free to them, but they are not requiring a
fee to provide the service, only asking for donations after the fact.
If you make frequent use of attachments, you are using a
disproportionate amount of bandwidth compared to other users, and
perhaps you should make an additional donation to help pay for it?

Hopefully you will have no problems with discarded emails if you trim
your attachments. If you do, I would like to hear about it. But until
then, have a great fall and winter LOWFER season!

73, Doug Reed, N0NAS.
LOWFER volunteer list admin.