ESP Projects Ltd: IT Support - Sheffield

One of the most frequent technical support issues we receive here at ESP is the problem of sending large email attachments, or lots of smaller attachments. The email system as we know it works so well that we have all become used to pressing that ‘send’ button and then just forgetting about it.

But what really happens after that? Well, your email is then sent-on either to your server, or to your ISP for processing. Just like the ‘snail mail’ system, once it has been dropped in the box, it is dealt with by third party carriers until it reaches its destination. Few of us realise however, that – just like the Post Office and its competitors - those carriers have a number of rules on what they are prepared to process.

In addition to these rules, outbound mail is also constrained by the size of your internet connection and what else the mail server is busy doing. If you only have a ‘standard’ business ADSL connection for example, your real ‘upload’ speed is around 50Kb per second. If you send a 500Kb attachment to 100 people, this is in effect asking your internet connection to process 50,000Kb, which would take around 17 minutes in total. Now if that little scenario happened on a server-based network you would also have to factor in that your server is also probably fairly busy coping with file processing, managing printers, running databases, sharing Outlook and tackling your accounts software. It is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that it will struggle to find the time and memory resources to spend a clear 17 minutes just sending your email. When you also factor in that your internet connection is also in all likelihood already being used for web browsing, automatic updates, virus updates, downloading email and sending out other people’s email it is quite easy to see how both the server and internet connect may actually grind to a halt just trying to send your message.

SO, how do we get around this problem?

It’s quite simple really: think ‘Post Office’! A plain email is like a letter. It can be sent without a care in the world, and 99% of the time arrives very quickly. If you are sending an email with 6 recipients, that’s the same as sending 6 letters. Again, there should be no problem slipping it into a post-box.

An email with an attachment is more like a parcel. You need to measure your parcel with care because it might be too big to process. You should do everything you can to ensure that is as small as possible, and perhaps consider sending it at the end of the day when there is no queue? You also have to consider how many parcels you are sending – no-one in their right mind would stand at the Post Office, squeezing 1000 parcels across the counter in one go! If you have a large distribution list, consider breaking it down into smaller chunks and sending out over time.

If your parcel is massive (and in email attachment terms, 3Mb is about the upper limit), you need to think about reducing it. Like posting an elephant in the post box, its gonna cause a blockage somewhere! Most of the time, files are oversize simply because the images in them are of a much higher resolution than they need to be. If you have created the document, you need to think about reducing the size of those GIF’s and JPG’s. Contrary to popular opinion, this does not mean making them physically smaller, rather compressing the information within them. Use your graphics package to do this. If someone else has given you the document, ask them for a ‘web version’ – a version that is shrunk to be able to be emailed or downloaded easily. And if it comes down to the wire and you simply have to get a huge file out there, consider using a CD and posting that instead…you will have to use snail mail of course, but at least you know it will get there!