On 26 Feb 2026, at 9:37, Charlie Clark wrote:
In order for HTML to work in e-mail, it had to be pretty verbose with lots of tags for the simplest of things. The result then has to be "encoded" into UU (unix-to-unix) format and you need the plain text version as well. This means that HTML mails are generally **at least** three times the size of a plain text one. And they don't say any more, often less.
HTML, no matter how verbose, uses text characters, nothing binary, and so is sent as-is, not encoded using UUencode. UUEncode was a very early mechanism for encoding binary data as plain text, and was used way back in the '90s. Since then, email has advanced with standardized multimedia mechanisms. These days, a binary attachment can very often be transmitted as-is in email, if the originating client, the originating server, the recipient server, and the recipient's client support the extension. If any element doesn't support it, the binary part is encoded using base64 (not UUencode), which does explode it to three times the size.
(There was a time when sending anything that used characters not present in U.S. ASCII did require a form of encoding, but these days support for Unicode is pretty robust.)
--Randall
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