techtips

SUCCESSFUL EMAIL ATTACHMENTS

By David Brauer

In order to provide for more reliable delivery of email attachments, PREL’s information technology group recommends the following:

1) Before attaching your file, make a copy and rename it following the “old-fashioned” 8.3 MS-DOS naming conventions. They are eight alphanumeric characters for the filename (with no special characters
such as a space, slash, period, and so forth) followed by a period and then the correct file extension
(these include .rtf for Rich Text Format, .doc for a Word document, and .xls for an Excel spreadsheet).
Underscores are permitted and can be used instead of spaces.

Here are some examples of both effective and ineffective MS-DOS file names:

	Good:	GoodFile.doc
	Unacceptable:	Bad File.doc (bad, due to the space)
	Good:	1OKFile.txt (numerals don’t matter)
	Unacceptable:	File2/13.xls (bad, due to the slash)
	Good:	File2_13.xls (underscores are fine)

2) If you are using a Windows PC, most programs will automatically append the period and the file extension when you save the document. You should use the file extension provided by the program so that the system on the other end will recognize the type of file you sent. Mac users will need to add a period and extension when saving the file.

3) With the advent of viruses and worms passed as email attachments, the following formats are most likely not to get blocked by the recipient’s email system:

.txt (plain unformatted text)
.rtf (Rich Text Format, which is an option when saving Word files)
.doc (standard Word file)
.zip (any file, compressed using the WinZip utility)

4) Remember that emails with attachments are always less reliable than emails without them. If you can put the information directly into the email, you probably should. If you really must send a document as an attachment, then the safest bet is to compress it with WinZip and inform your recipients that they will need to uncompress it with that utility. If you must send the document uncompressed, then .doc or .rtf will probably get through if you follow the naming conventions described above.

Tech Tips provides information on the use and maintenance of computers. PREL offers no guarantee against any loss that may occur to your computer system as a result of using this advice. Professional assistance should be consulted as appropriate.