Attaching large files

Question

When I reduce a tiff. photo in Photoshop and in Mail attach it to an email it reverts the size back to the original photo size( which is to large to mail). In Photoshop the Image size says its been reduced, it shows the size has been reduced, its been saved to my desktop. Yet when I attach it to Mail its back to the original size. What the hey am I doing wrong?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As Stanley provided, all message attachments must be encoded before being sent or during the sending process and decoded when received.
Mail uses MIME 1.0 for attachment encoding/decoding which is the internet standard. The problem with MIME is it isn't very efficient. The encoding process increases the size of the pre-encoded file by roughly 50% or so.
A 6 MB file (pre-encoded) will be roughly 9 MB in size after the encoding process.
This is not unique to Mail - the same applies to any email client.