My attachments grow? Macro Virus?

kbarreth

Registered
Hi. Does anyone know why my Word 2004 documents "grow" when I attach them to a mail message? Let's say the documents is just 2 MB large. When I attach it to an "empty" mail message, it grows to 3MB. Is this normal? It's not a real problem for me (yet), but I was just wondering if Word is infected with a Macro Virus.
 
What are you using to estimate the size of the file? Finder? Mail?

It's likely that whatever reports 2MB is reporting slightly low, and whatever (Mail?) is reporting 3MB is reporting slightly high. Plus, one may be using a binary representation (1,024 = 1k) and another is reporting a decimal notation (1,000 = 1k).

I highly doubt it's a macro virus, as the macro virus wouldn't be able to execute by simply attaching a Word document to a mail message -- unless you were using some function within Word to attach the file. What's the exact procedure you use when you attach a Word document to an email?
 
Don't forget the encoding process which happens when you attach a file to an email message. Depending on the encoding method (eg, AppleDouble, UU etc), you can have varying file sizes - but ALL will be larger than that of the original file.
 
Thanks, it's good to know that it's probably not a macro virus. The difference in size appears when I compare the process window (when sending) in Entourage with the size of the document in Finder.

Kjell-Einar
 
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