Large E-Mail Attachments

I click the "Send and Receive" button on my email client and expect it pause for a second or two and respond by either displaying the new messages or tell me that there are no new messages. Instead, I press the button and wait, and wait, and wait... "Has my email client frozen? Did my Internet connection die? Is there a problem with my mail server?" I press stop, and then "Send and Receive". Same thing. I open my web browser and type www.google.com -- it loads fine. OK, so my Internet connection is fine. Then why the hell... Oh, that's why. Someone sent me an email with a huge file attachment and the computer was just taking a long time to download it.

I don't understand why people think they can send a 10MB file attachment through the email. Sure, you can do it and the email client probably won't complain unless the mail server rejects it for it's size or times out before the upload is finished. With the advent of webmail clients, large file attachments are no problem. The file attachment is simply displayed as a link that allows you to download the attachment at will. When you open an email through a webmail application, the email content is displayed and the file attachment remains on the server, no big-file-downloading necessary. However, for those of us who still use email clients, such as myself, big file attachments can be very annoying.

So what's a good solution to this problem? Obviously if you need to send a big file through the email, then you need to get it sent one way or another. The best solution is to upload the file somewhere and then provide a link to the file in your email. If you already have a website hosted somewhere, you can probably upload the file to your website using an FTP client. If you don't know how to do that, then it would be easier to upload the file using a file upload service such as SaveFile.com.

SaveFile.com allows you to upload a file without even registering for their service. The file can be as large as 60MB, and you can upload an unlimited number of files. If you use the non-registration method of uploading a file, you will be provided with a link to the file after it has been uploaded. You can paste this link in your email, or send it to your friends/co-workers through an Instant Message. The file will automatically be deleted from SaveFile.com if there is no download activity for 30 days. With the non-registration method of uploading files, the only way to retrieve links to previous file uploads is to use their "Recover my links" feature, which is based on the IP address of the person who uploaded the file. If you have a broadband connection, chances are that your IP address will remain the same for quite awhile (forever, if you have a static IP). If your IP address matches the IP address you had when you uploaded the file, then the link to that file will be displayed. Ingenious way of recovering something that was submitted without registration. 🙂

To summarize, if an email file attachment is going to be over 1MB, please upload the file and insert a link to the file in your email! For people with purely webmail clients, it saves space. For those with real email clients, it saves time and the headaches of waiting!

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  1. tell me about it, i get emails like that, and what literally wait 10-15 minutes for all the mail to load. but on another subject, im taking l-carnitine, you think i should take l-arginine with it? what exactly is l-arginine for?
    im also taking l-glutamine, which i know what that is for.

  2. You can find information about L-Arginine on BodyBuilding.com; check out this article. I only take L-Glutamine, as I believe its the only necessary supplement.

    For a quick list of the supplements I take, check out this post.