Matthias, You're going to love this. In Evgeny's message, the filenames are base64 Windows-1251 encoded, i.e "=?Windows-1251?B?...", and are quite log. Simply changing them to "filename.txt" (or anything else simple and short), changes the processing time for the message to 0.02 sec (from 12+ sec). Something else to look at tomorrow :-) David