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Somebody recently posted a complaint in a forum, whining about the fact that services like GMail, Yahoo Mail, HotMail, and others apparently either won’t accept emails with big attachments, or they strip them off.  That’s like complaining that you can’t fit your entire wedding party into your Volkswagon Beatle for a cross-country trip.  It’s the wrong solution to the problem!

Email attachments get encoded into a form that roughly doubles their size, called Base64.  So a 10k attachment makes the email around 20k.  I had someone try to “forward” me an email to which she attached a 40MB zip file.  She was confounded that her email service wouldn’t accept it.  DUH!  Even if it would have, my mail server is configured to reject any emails with attachments over 2MB.  I just don’t want ‘em!

Most viruses and trojans are sent as attachments to emails.  And most of THEM tend to be files with extensions like .exe, .com, .dll, and .js.  Google even rejects emails with zip files attached to them that contain files with these extensions.  I think that’s smart.

Here’s the solution:

If you have a hosting account ANYWHERE that gives you FTP access, all you need to do is upload the file to your hosting account via FTP and send the person a URL to it in the email.  It’s that simple. This is a great use for those free hosting accounts your ISP gives you with your internet service.

There’s absolutely no need to send big file attachments on emails to anybody, EVER.

Hello
I’ve really enjoyed reading the comments I’ve gotten back
from the last newsletter. Everybody said they like my
“style”; they appreciate the fact that I don’t bombard them
with all the latest launches; and most asked for more useful
info and tools.

I’d like to thank everybody who replied, and welcome any
further comments about what you think of these newsletters
and what you’d like to see.

Here’s an interesting story that happened to me last week. Continue Reading »

I was reading a thread in a forum recently where a software vendor was wanting to know how to best educate his AOL customers about how to whitelist his email address so as to allow his emails to get through to them.  One of the suggestions was:

• Get another email account / provider somewhere
• Subscribe to the vendor’s list using that email address

While many folks might regard the above suggestion as silly, it really isn’t.  First off, what a lot of people on AOL don’t realize is that they *CAN* actually have other email accounts AND mailboxes with other hosts! Continue Reading »