Member Avatar for Danarchy

Hello.
I talked with Apple and Charter (my isp) about this to no avail.
My father sent some .jpgs in varying sizes, averaging around 400-700 Kb. I forwarded a 632 Kb image (actually 403 Kb on my desktop) back to him and to myself. His was rejected by his isp for being too large for his service. Mine came through, but it's size was now 4.5MB! Quite a leap in size. My father uses Incredimail and I just use 'Mail' on my eMacs.
Charter says they've had problems with Incredimail.
But nobody has any answers other than to remove the images and send them. I'd like to be able to just forward them, but can't.
Any ideas or answers would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Danarchy
eMac 1Ghz 1024 RAM OSX 3.8

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Generated

Quick expert note that expands on 's point and gives practical fixes.

IncrediMail often embeds pictures into an HTML template instead of attaching the original file. When a message with embedded images is forwarded by a different client, the images become MIME parts inside the message and are usually encoded for transport (base64). Base64 adds roughly 33% overhead (original_size * 4/3), so a small increase is normal. A jump from ~400 KB to 4.5 MB, however, usually means the image was duplicated or rewritten into one or more additional parts (inline display + background + attachment) or otherwise reprocessed by the sending client.

Simple checks and fixes

  1. Save the image you received to disk (do not forward directly). Compare its Finder "Get Info" size to the file that gets sent.
  2. Forward as the original file: in Mail use "Forward as Attachment" or create a new message and attach the saved JPEG. That preserves the original bytes and avoids client re-encoding.
  3. Ask the IncrediMail sender to switch to sending images as standard attachments or to remove fancy backgrounds/templates; that prevents inlining.
  4. Diagnose the mail source: view the raw message (look for multiple Content-Type: image/jpeg parts or Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64) to see whether the image appears more than once.

If ISP limits block delivery, use one of these workarounds: resize or re-export the JPEG in Preview (File -> Export, lower quality), compress into a .zip, or upload to a cloud service and send a link. These keep the file small and avoid client-specific HTML embedding that causes bloat.

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Member Avatar for chizy2

This is because Incredimail uses an HTML background, as viewed on a text email platform, all of the HTML and images are part of the message ( hince the extra file sizes above the jpg size ).

Member Avatar for Danarchy

This is because Incredimail uses an HTML background, as viewed on a text email platform, all of the HTML and images are part of the message ( hince the extra file sizes above the jpg size ).

Thanks!
Apple and Charter had an idea it was because of Incredimail. But wasn't sure why. This makes perfect sense.
Thanks again.

Danarchy.

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