Roady said:
I think Judi means the "Send Pictures via E-mail" dialog which allows you
to reduce the size of the pictures before attaching. It's aWindows feature.
I forgot about that one. I rarely work backwards right-click on a file to
use Send To which kicks off the wizard. While writing an e-mail is when I
decide to then insert the picture as an attachment. Maybe
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/883393/en-us applies to the OP.
I put large files on the disk space for my personal web pages or use some
other online storage to let the recipient get them from there. I don't
compress images so the recipient gets a crappy copy. It is stupid to be
bloating e-mails by encoding binaries into a text portion within the e-mail
and slowing the download of my mails with pictures or other huge attachments
that the recipient may not even want, especially if they have a slow
connection, like dial-up, that makes them have to wait for a huge download.
E-mail sucks for huge file transfer because:
- The size of an attached binary file will balloon its size from 30% to 50%
more bytes due to encoding it into a plain-text part within the e-mail.
E-mail gets transmitted as plain text.
- Most Internet users still use dial-up so they have a slow connection.
They really don't appreciate having to wait to download a huge mail with an
attachment they may not want or that they may want later but still need to
get the e-mail telling them about it.
- You consume the recipient's disk quota and fill up their mailbox with huge
mails. The same for the disk space consumed by the e-mail providers.
- The recipient's message store for their e-mail client gets consumed with
mails with huge attachments. This can cause problems when a maximum size
limit is reached and necessitates the recipient having to clean out all
those huge mails or remove their unneeded or unwanted attachments and then
compact their message store.
- The recipient's mailbox may not be as large as yours so you can severely
impact their quota. Just because you have a 2.5GB disk quota for your
mailbox doesn't help the recipient that only has a 2MB disk quota for their
mailbox.
- The recipient's mailbox might already have lots of mails in it so there is
not enough room for your hugely bloated mail. This may result in the sender
getting their mail rejected on delivery wasting more resources to tell the
sender they are way too fat. You see a lot of doors, furniture, or cars
that are designed for 500+ pound gargantuans?
- The sender can consume all or nearly all of the recipient's mailbox quota
which results in all further mails from other senders getting rejected. You
have effectively killed their mailbox. I doubt they will really thank you
for that. This isn't just for sloppy and lazy users that never bother to
clean the trash out of their mailbox. Sending just one 1.9MB mail to their
2MB mailbox that already had just a few messages sitting in it could consume
their remaining quota which results in many other incoming mails getting
rejected. It is unlikely that your huge mails are any more important or
critical to the recipient than are mails from other senders.
- Rather than send a tiny e-mail with links to let the recipient decide if
and when to download the huge binary, you are rude in taking away that
choice and make them waste time, bandwidth, and disk space (in their mailbox
and on their hard drive) with a binary they may not want or just do not want
right now.
- You doubly waste their time to download a huge mail due to the additional
time for them to scan it using their anti-virus program, if they leave
enabled that option which is normally the default. Also, you increase the
risk of timeouts in their e-mail client which results in having to retry
retrieving the same huge mail which wastes more of their time to redownload
the same bytes they got before. While the recipient may disable their own
anti-virus product's e-mail scanning, many e-mail providers also scan
incoming mails for viruses. The more time you waste for them to scan for
viruses the less mails they can process.
- The recipient doesn't get their connection's full bandwidth to download
mails. The mail server likely throttles each connection to provide
responsiveness for all the other concurrent connections. E-mail is NOT a
fast file transfer method.
- There is no recovery for corrupted downloads of mail. There is no
checking that the received file matches the original - because it is all
just text and there is no CRC or other checking to ensure an exact match.
If the downloaded copy is corrupted or fails, they have to get the sender to
send it all over again. E-mail is NOT a reliable file transfer mechanism.
- The user cannot resume in case they actually need to use their computer
and have to interrupt the long download of your huge mail.
- You choke more of the Internet with your huge mails because they got
bloated due to encoding and the recipient may not even want the huge
attachment, so you aren't just affecting you and the recipient. What
happens when there is too big a load in the toilet bowl? Bandwidth is not
infinite.
- Compressing image files, if compressible, to get them smaller means
quality suffers. So why bother sending a crappy looking image to the
recipient just so you can make your mail small enough to fit in their
mailbox or below the cap on the size of a message that you can send? If you
feel the image could be compressed then why aren't you compressing it in the
first place, and then send that copy which would not require further
compression? Because you don't want the crappy version, either!
Sending huge mails with bloated binary attachments is usually rude to the
recipient (and everyone else, too). While e-mail providers usually put a
cap on the size of the message, that capsize (pun intended) has been
growing. Just imagine a choked Internet if there were no cap on the size of
a message with all the idiots transferring huge files via e-mail. Hey Mark,
George here sending you this 700MB .iso file although I could've sent you a
link to it. Hi George, Mark here sending you a 38GB drive image file you
can use to prep your hard drive. Hi everyone, Mr. Rude here wanting to send
multiple 10MB e-mails to you to eventually consume all your mailbox's disk
quota. Hello, Mr. Stupid here that doesn't give a gnat's fart about anyone
else's problems as long as I get my task completed. Instead of sending them
a 5KB message with a link to a huge file to let the recipient decide if and
when to download it (and also faster than through e-mail), you instead send
them a huge mail that incurs all the disadvantages listed above. The
recipient probably wants to read their other mails, too, and not have to
wait for your bloated mail to get downloaded.
If you are too lazy to upload your file to the disk quota for your personal
web page (there are freebie's everywhere), Yahoo's Briefcase, Shutterfly, or
to other online storage then use something like dropload.com (but you won't
be able to make as nice and fluffy mails as you could using your own e-mail
client).
