I Beware of sending files that are too big Most email systems can t deal with a single in Software

Encoder QR Code 2d barcode in Software I Beware of sending files that are too big Most email systems can t deal with a single

email file that s bigger than about 2MB Personally, I d consider 1MB to be your upper limit on file size If you send a very large file to someone, it can get stuck in their mail

server, clogging up messages that are trying to come in afterwards Check the file size of your attachments (see Figure 16-1) before sending them I strongly recommend resizing images that you plan to email down to about 640 480 pixels When you attach a digital image to an email message, the attachment usually ends up about 10 percent larger than the original image because of the encoding necessary to send it across the Internet

systems can accept multiple attached files in each email message, AOL doesn t quite know what to make of that kind of message Usually, only one of the attachments will get to the recipient, and the others will simply disappear Send AOL users one attachment at a time

between virtually any two Internet mail programs in the world, but if you want to send an attachment, sometimes it won t work quite right The solution Your mail program may allow you to change the way your attachment is encoded If that s the case, you

FIGURE 16-1

This 27MB file is simply too large to email effectively Resize it or change it into another file format so that it s under a megabyte

may be able to experiment and send the file to the recipient anyway The most common encoding schemes are called MIME and UUENCODE If your recipient claims that an attachment came in all garbled it looks like page after page of meaningless text instead of a picture switch from MIME to UUENCODE or vice versa Attachments should be icons you can actually click on to view, such as the one in Figure 16-2 If that doesn t work for other users, you can always switch back again In Outlook, for instance, you can find these settings by choosing Tools | Options and clicking the Mail Format tab of the Options dialog box (shown here) From there, click the Settings button and change the format

A lot of resolution is good for printing, but two- and three-megapixel digital images are cumbersome to send through email You really should resize pictures in your favorite image editor before attaching them to electronic messages (I explain how to do that in 11) In general, email-bound images should be cropped and/or resized down to 640 480 pixels and saved in JPG format If you remember to do that, you ll never get any complaints from friends or family that your images are too big and are clogging their email system

FIGURE 16-2

This is what an attachment looks like in many email programs; attachments that are decoded incorrectly by your mail program will instead turn out to be page after page of gibberish

If you don t mind spending a few dollars, you can get a specialized program for cropping and resizing images as well A Smaller Image from TriVista (wwwtrivistacom) is a great little program for prepping your photos for email This simple $15 program is designed from the ground up to crop and resize photos After you drag an image into the application window, you can move a cropping frame around the screen until you ve composed the picture just the way you want The cool part is that you can configure the cropping frame s proportion based on how large you want the resulting photo to be, so there s absolutely no guesswork Set the end photo size to 640 480, for instance, and the cropping frame is proportioned exactly right for the job You can also scale the cropping frame to include more or less of the original image in the new, resized photo It s all very clever and makes you wonder why no one has ever thought of that before