FAQ: HOWTO Send Attachments

Emails can be sent with files as "attachments". This HOWTO tells you how to send attachments.

Compression

If possible, compress your data to avoid problems with mail gateways and to make it easier to store them.

Unix users: The program "compress" is still a standard but does not compress as well as "GNU Zip" (gzip); even better is "bzip" but it is not supported as well.

Windows users should use WinZip.

"A pictures says more than a thousand words": Many kinds of pictures allow for a reduction in data as the human eye is not capable of seeing every little detail. This is when you can use "compression" with JPEG.

Please do not send pictures in format BMP - that's usually overkill. (Eat your heart out, MicroSoft!)

Attach a Note

Let the recipient know what the attachments are all about!

Filenames
Short Description
Long Description
Actions required
Programs required

Avoid special characters in filenames, ie commas and spaces, high-bit characters (Krauts please read "umlauts"), as well as directory/folder delimiters such as backslashes (DOS), colons (Macintosh), and slashes (Unix).

Just use small letters, the dot and the undersore. Avoid (file) systems which choke on such filenames.

URL:     http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/faq/sending.attachments.html
Created: Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 MET 2000

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Sven Guckes guckes-attachments@math.fu-berlin.de