Knowing how to attach and send files and photos with your email is very handy. Knowing how to deal with attachments you receive so that you don’t lose all of your precious work is even handier. Web2Go gives you the inside scoop on how to handle and downsize attachments like a pro.
I was advised when I began writing for Web2Go not to mention my cat too many times. Nobody said anything about not mentioning my Dad too many times so he’s going to be my example (and cautionary tale) again this week.
A few months ago I got a late-night phone call from Dad saying he had received an email from a colleague asking him to make a few changes to an attached document in preparation for a presentation they were going to give at eight o’clock the following morning.
Dad opened the attachment, spent four and a half hours polishing the MS Word document to perfection, saved his work and closed his email program. He came back to his keyboard half an hour later, opened the email program and then the attachment he had been slaving away at. To his horror, none of the changes he had made to the attached document had been saved. How could that be if he had specifically gone to the ‘File’ menu and selected ‘Save’ before closing his email program?
As I explained to him over the phone that night, when you open file attachments, if your extra-cautious email program considers them to be safe, it puts them into a subdirectory of your Temporary Internet Files directory. (This is known as the OLK folder in MS Outlook, for example).
If you’re lucky, the attachment you made changes to will still be sitting in that temporary folder waiting to be fished out. (Be warned: it can be a pain trying to scavenge around in the innermost workings of your email program to find the temporary folder.)
To avoid this hassle altogether, save your email attachment somewhere else on your hard drive that’s easily accessible before you start working on it. Here’s a link to the instructions.
Another common complaint about email attachments is that they’re too big. Many of us have had that nightmarish experience of waiting for Aunty June’s entire 300-photo South Pacific cruise album to download on a dial-up connection!
If your email program is taking ages to send a file or if your friends and family complain that they end up receiving 30 copies of the same email from you, it could mean that the file you’re try to send is too big and your email program has attempted to send it more than once.
It’s a good idea to compress large files using a program like WinZip, WinRAR or the free open-source 7-zip. (Windows XP and Vista also have built in file and zip compression features.)
Mac heads can take care of file compression with StuffIt.
Installing the Windows XP PowerToys image resizer will also enable you to resize your pictures very quickly just by right-clicking your mouse.
Resizing your pictures and then putting them into a compressed folder will make your emailing life much faster and easier.
You might also want to check out Pando, another free program which is specifically designed to help you send and receive large email files.
So there you have it – email attachments in a nutshell. As I said before, Web 2.0 is really all about you so if anything I’ve blogged doesn’t make sense and needs more explanation, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and let me know!
Next week … Help! I’ve just got Windows Vista and I’m totally confused.
Jenny Kapp
