Need to send a huge file? Shrink it!

Question: I have been sending large files as e-mail attachments to a colleague in another office, but the IT guys (tech staff at work) have been complaining because it bogs down the e-mail computer. Is there anything I can do to solve this problem? —SB

Answer: I always recommend that you not use e-mail to send file attachments any larger than about two megabytes (2MB). Often e-mail servers—which are the computers that direct e-mail traffic—are set up to give the users a finite amount of disk space to store incoming and outgoing e-mail. Large file attachments can eat into this allocation and prevent the e-mail account holder from getting any more e-mail, by exceeding their e-mail storage space.

If you have a slow connection, uploading and downloading e-mail can take a long time when big attachments are involved.

Your best bet is to shrink the file using a file compression tool. First off, here’s how to tell how big a file is in Windows, before you send it. Locate the file using either My Computer or Windows Explorer. Click on the file you want to attach to select it, and then right-click it. A dialogue box will appear with information about the file. Look at the Size entry. This will be measured in bytes, kilobytes (KB), or megabytes (MB). There are one million bytes (so 1,000 kilobytes) in a megabyte.

Now, here’s how to shrink the file size for sending.

There are programs that can convert a file into a ZIP file. They remove extra space in the file (white space or repetitive data), and compact the file down. It kind of crunches it and renames the file with a .ZIP extension. So ilovegranny.ppt would become ilovegranny.zip. Depending on the file type, the file size could be reduced by as much as 90%.

This makes the IT guys happy, the e-mail server healthy, and makes it quicker to send and receive the file as an attachment.

If there’s a catch, it’s that when the recipient gets the file, they have to uncrunch the file back to its regular state. If they are using Microsoft Windows ME or XP (the operating systems that came after Windows 98), all they have to do is save the compressed attachment to their hard drive and double-click it. Windows ME will display the file inside the .ZIP file, and it can be dragged out to its full size.

If the recipient doesn’t have Windows ME or XP, they can download either WinZip or use StuffIt for Windows. Both programs are great at zipping and unzipping these kinds of files.