Excess baggage
In these days of broadband, when multi-megabyte files can be downloaded in a matter of minutes or even seconds, it’s very tempting to send them to all your pals.
Resist that temptation. There are several reasons why sending unsolicited attachments is a bad idea:
- The size of most people’s mailboxes is limited. Sure, some of the webmail providers offer storage in the gigabyte range. But conventional email addresses come with much smaller storage space; 10 megabytes is by no means uncommon. It only takes a handful of large, high-quality image files to use up all that storage space – and then that address can no longer receive other emails until the files have been deleted!
- The increasing prevalence of anti-spam and anti-virus measures means that your message may not even get through if you’ve attached a file to it. This depends on what type of file it is and what settings the recipient has chosen for his email program.
- The person you’re sending to may not want to receive your attachment in any case – particularly if you’re sending something non-work related to someone at their workplace.
So if you want to send someone a file, it’s better to ask them first – particularly if it’s a large file or you’re sending to a work email address.
Better still: if the image, document or file is available online, why not send them a link to it? That way you give your email’s recipient the choice of whether and when to look at it. You also keep the use of Internet network resources down, which helps keep data generally moving more quickly.
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March 29th, 2007 at 10:41 UTC
In the days before we had broadband some twit sent me, by email attachment, the entire contents of her photo album. I couldn’t receive other emails for hours and hours while these blasted photos were being downloaded.
I know now that there are other ways to deal with this, eg deleting them from the server and not downloading them at all. But the point remains – doing this kind of thing can lead to tears of anger and frustration from the hapless recipient.
On a similar point, these “forward to all your friends” things are a real pain too. Perhaps a subject for a future posting?