Be Polite – Zip Your E-mail Attachments

Just a quick one tonight.

I’m sure we all have people who love to send e-mail attachments at the drop of a hat and often those attachments can be several megabytes each especially if they are photos from a digital camera or large documents. Whilst most of us have a broadband connection of some sort, the mailboxes offered by ISPs and also on corporate Microsoft Exchange accounts can be easily overwhelmed if you don’t keep on top of your mail.

To take a page out of my wife’s book – “it’s nice to be nice”. What I mean by this is if you are going to send someone an attachment, do them the courtesy of saving space and zipping it up before sending it off. People may not realise but attachments can grow up to twice the size given how e-mails are encoded for transmission meaning that 3MB attachment can take up to 6MB of space in the recipient’s mailbox.

If you want some recommendations on good compression software, you might want to consider:

• 7-Zip (free and has to option to compress and e-mail in one click),
• Peazip (free but requires manual zipping and attachment to e-mail),
• WinZip (US$29.95 and also has the ability to compress and e-mail in one click).

Of course, there are plenty of other pieces of software that offer the same functionality so you can pick one that you like if required.

So next time you are going to send someone an attachment make sure you compress it first – it’s the nice thing to do.