TechBlog

I’m sure you’ve all seen it before; someone finds a video of a cute puppy sleeping on its back and emails it to everyone in their address book. Fine and dandy, but so often people download the video and attach it to their email to send to you. What’s really happening is this: they download the video from a server somewhere, attach it to an email message, the attachment is uploaded to their mail server then transferred to yours, and then you download it from your mail server to watch it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply give the person a link to the site with the video so they can watch it directly? Yes, yes it does make more sense.

When you send a large attachment, you’re not only sending redundant data over the internet as described above, you’re unnecessarily clogging the recipients’ email boxes (and your own)! Not only that, can you imagine being forced to download the massive video over dial-up or some other slow internet uplink? The image on the right is a perfect example; while Dax will get the video in minutes or even seconds, mom and grandma might have to wait hours for the message to arrive in their inbox. Not only that, if they don’t have a webmail service to delete the message before their mail client starts downloading it, they’ll have to wait for your message to completely download before they can get ANY other email! Poor grandma - she’ll never use email again. And Dax probably doesn’t even like puppies.

Don’t put your grandmother through this - find the video online (e.g. YouTube, search on Google) and send her the link rather than the video itself. FYI, the same idea applies to audio files and large photos.