Does mail calculate message size?

Mail doesn't do this and never has. There's no way to know the size of your email until -after- you send it. What you're referring to as seeing a size for each email was for email you received, and that size is transmitted by the mail server when Mail gets the mail.

Mulder

Tiger Mail does do this -- at least my Tiger 10.4.10 Mail does. Create a new message and drag an attachment into the message body -- the larger "asciified" size of the draft message with attachment will be displayed at the bottom of the message window in its own field separate from the actual message body -- before the message is sent. Don't see that happening in Leopard Mail anymore.

I think a rough rule of thumb is to take attachment size times 8 divided by 7 to estimate how much larger that file attachment is going to make your email message.

See the picture at this link. Mail, in Tiger, "Message Size 48.0 KB" right at the bottom of the "New Message" window after any attachment is added to the message.
http://img2.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/26809282c9.png

Yes, I see that, but it's for an attachment, not the actual email; and Mail isn't calculating that figure, either. It's coming from the system calculation on the Get Info information. Mail does not and never has calculated the size of a mail message being sent. It cannot know the size until after it's sent.

Mulder

Well, it does say "Message Size." And if you cut and paste a large .txt file (created by, say, Terminal's pico text editor) that is on the order of, say, 128 kB, into a blank email's message body, then concurrently open a new blank email message, then drag, for example, the same PDF file that is on the order of, say, 768 kB in size per Finder Get Info, into each of the new message's body, then the two "under construction" mail messages will, in fact, report two different "message sizes" at about 1000 kB for the "attachment-only" message and around 1.2 MB for the "text-plus-attachment" message. At least they just did for me. So I don't know what all is being reported there, but doing the above experiment would suggest that it is certainly something more than just what can be attributed to the size of the file attachment alone, to the tune of about 200 kB.

But all that aside, it is, nevertheless, unfortunate that this functionality has seemingly been removed from Leopard Mail. It was a convenient "safety check" for senders when dealing with recipients whose mail account providers were known to impose somewhat draconian inbound message size limitations, even if were not exact. It would be nice if there were a way to enable such functionality in Leopard Mail, rather than to have to rely on the soon-to-follow MAILER-DAEMON messages from the intended recipient's mailserver.

I'm new to the Mac. 3 Months. I send many picture attachments to family and friends. Until this morning I could see the estimated size on the lower left side of the message as I dropped pictures into it. quoted from the help file :

"When you’re composing a message, Mail displays the total size of the message, including images and other attachments, at the bottom left of the window." and..

"Resize the pictures. Mail inserts the image into the message in its actual size. Choose a smaller size from the Image Size pop-up menu at the bottom right of the window."

I was sending messages yesterday and it worked fine. It's missing today. I've tried to locate setting preferences but can find none. Any suggestions as to how to restore this? My OS is Leopard.