1 May, 2010
You have been trying to email some photos and they just won’t leave the outbox or the recipient received them 50 times, what has happened? Many people are baffled by this and often have trouble when sending emails with attachments such as photos. The answer is to do with file sizes and internet connection speeds. When you send an email your computer has to “push” a copy of the file that you are sending out through your internet connection to the recipient’s mailbox. At the same time your email software (normally Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Mail) will only allow a fixed time for this event to happen (normally 2 to 3 minutes) before it gives up and tries to send again a short time later. It can sometimes “just” complete the task but think it hasn’t and then try sending again. This causes the recipient to get heaps of copies of the same email – which often gets confused further by thinking that one of the parties has a virus. The other result can be that the email never gets sent and stays in the outbox trying constantly to send and slowing the senders internet to the point of being next to useless. There are a couple of fixes – one is to have a faster internet plan which will help to some degree. A more effective fix is to set your email software to try to send for the maximum time – normally 5 to 10 minutes before giving up (this is a setting in an advanced settings section). The last really effective fix is to send smaller files. We often see customers trying to send 50Meg of data / photos in one email – which will never happen. The normal limits are around 5Meg in the one email. So if you have several photos or files to send consider either resizing them to be smaller or split them up into several emails with only one or two files in each. Modern cameras are making this problem worse because while they are taking better photos with more detail this is resulting in larger files sizes and now just one photo can be 5Meg in size. If you are having trouble resizing them then Google “resizing photos for emailing” and follow the suggestions there (with screen shots). Also be careful when using a scanner to scan photos or even documents because again most people scan at too high a resolution and even in colour when just black & white is needed resulting in a scan file size that can easily be 100 times larger than necessary. As a rough guide for most users, document scanning at 150DPI (dots per inch) in black & white is normally sufficient, with most photos only needing 100 to 300DPI. It is only when scanning a really small image such as a postage stamp that you want to enlarge that you will need settings up around 600DPI. Kerr Solutions is at 128 Musgrave Street & is contactable on 49 222 400.
