Worldlink, Inc.

Email attachment guidelines

When sending attachments to email messages, there are important considerations to take that will avoid problems for you, the sender, and for the person receiving the email.

Know the size of the file you are attaching!!!
Know how fast your internet connection is.
Make a reasonable guess about how fast the receiver's internet connection is.

Why are these things so important? First, the mail message has to make it off of your computer and on to the mail server. If you're dialing into the internet with a modem, the fastest you're likely to be able to send email is 4K (K = Kilobytes) per second. Many modems will be even slower! For example, if you're sending a picture you scanned, and it's size is 50K then it will take about 13 seconds to send it. If you scanned the picture in excruciating detail, and the size is closer to 1.5MB (MB = Megabytes = 1000K) then it will take over 6 minutes to send it. If you scanned in the whole roll of film, then the size of the all the pictures is probably way too large to send in just one email message.

Customers that have DSL are able to send and receive larger email messages than dialup customers, provided the person receiving the message can handle it. Note the typical "upstream" on a DSL line is about 7 times as fast as a modem.

Some Email providers limit the maximum message size that people can receive, Usually this limit is less than 2MB. Worldlink does not do this, nor do we limit the maximum message size that a customer may send. Some email providers also do not allow email attachments to be delivered to their users. There is usually some practical limit on how big an email can be.

Rules of thumb:

Realistically, your emails should be UNDER 100K to ensure efficient delivery. Note that a 5 paragraph letter is about 20 times smaller. In general, don't send email messages over 1.5MB if either you, or the recipient has a dial up connection to the internet.
If you are a DSL user, you can send larger emails, up to about 5MB. Still this is rather large for an email message (email wasn't designed to do this!), and you should keep the size UNDER 100K for efficient delivery.
The "text" of your email message is typically small compared to any photos, Microsoft Word documents, or programs you may send. We recommend against sending MP3, or other music and video files via email. Even though they are compressed, they are still much larger than email was designed to deal with.