I don’t wanna do it, but i gotta pit my cousin for sending me junk. We’re close to the same age (I’m 2 years older than she is) and we grew up on the same street. She helped me plan my wedding. But she is kinda nutty. Another relative and I usually have conversations on “Guess what “Sue (not her real name)” did now”.
Her latest exploit was to have a baby because she wanted to do it before the “eggs dried up”. (her words…geez, she’s still in her 30’s, you have time girl!) Sue isn’t married.
But Sue has a habit of emailing every screwball virus warning, chain letter and urban legend hoax known to mankind. Now, I’ve spoken to her about it and my own influx of crap mail has died down a bit. But I think its just me. Everyone else on her email list probably still gets them. But the thing she does that really gets me upset is emailing huge file attachments. Especially since the baby was born. You know, Sue, sending a picture of your infant son as a jpg doesn’t mean you have to send a 3 and half megabyte jpg. Oh, man and the AVI files…A 23 mb avi of her baby in a kiddie pool.
I don’t know how she’s making these things or if she even has any software that can reduce the file size, but for pity’s sake, woman, stop doing it! How many times do I have to explain to you how its too much for some people to download? some of our relatives are still using dial up! Do you think Aunt D can handle a 20 meg avi of your kid on her ancient PC and dial up connection? I have DSL and my machine is less than a year old and you still effectively locked outlook up with THREE huge fuckin’ AVI’s in three different simultaneous emails!
The bad thing is, she always feels as if I’m being a jerk when I try to explain it to her. Heck, I like getting a jpg of the baby, but not a 3 plus mb jpg. Its freakin’ giant!
This probably isn’t pit worthy, but I had to get it off of my chest.
Trust me, corporate IT folks don’t like it too much either. A colleague of mine once had to resuscitate an Exchange server after someone sent an email with 65mb of photos from the office party to all the 150+ people who attended - he wasn’t happy.
He was even less happy when he found she had resent the email because the mail server had crashed just after she sent it and she wasn’t sure whether everyone had got it. Twice.
It never seems to occur to people that if [size of email] x [no of recipients] = REALLY Big Number, you should think twice about sending the damn thing.
For home email, it helps to check your email online, so you can delete any huge emails before trying to download them to your computer. (I’ve stopped downloading emails at all, though, after I had to do an emergency reformat of my C:/ drive).
Not that I disagree with your rant. I swear, some people have never gotten over that whole, “Ooh, Internet! Check out this funny picture,” stage. Like my former college roommate, who sends every bit of Internet shit that has been around since 1997 and who doesn’t bother to actually write emails of substance. (Sorry for the rant; I’m this close to losing it and going off on her for all the shit she sends out.)
Maybe you should try a different tact–try to sell her on using YouSendIt or Rapidshare. That way you don’t have to try and convince her to shrink the files, but it’s far less of a problem for the recievers since they’re getting only links, not the files themselves. Because I really don’t envy you the job of trying to convince her to shrink the files.
Rapidshare is excellent, but my experience with YouSendIt has been rather mixed.
As for resizing photos, send your friend a link to Picasa or some other free photo editing software. Even a full screen-sized jpeg shouldn’t be more than a couple hundred kilobytes if compressed properly.
There are also myriad photo hosting websites where you can put your photos and then send a link. There are quite a few free ones, but i use a cheap paid service called pbase. For $23 a year you get 400Mb of storage. Even at a (rather large) 250kb per picture, that’s 1600 pictures. And if you need more storage, you can get 1.2Gb for $60 a year. It’s easy to upload, and pbase provides good-looking style sheets for customizing the look of your pages.
For video, tell her to upload to Google Video or YouTube. Like with photo hosting sites, that will allow her to send a link rather than massive files.
And, if the big attachments keep coming, you really need to get serious and tell her in no uncertain terms to knock it off, even if it means a scathing “Reply all” email.
Tell your friend that her emails are causing your box to become full and when people try to email you their messages are bouncing. And you’ve missed some important emails because of it.
Then tell her you love seeing pics and movies of the baby so you thought it’d be great if she got a Picasa or Flickr account to share them with you (and everyone else).
Or tell her you’ll get a gmail account and she can send pics there because they allow you more storage than your ISP does. That way she can still email huge pics and you can not download them.
My father sends me photos to my hotmail account. He’s got some 8 megapixel camera with gobblygook that means each picture is huge. I can’t tell him to make them smaller because he is easily offended and I don’t want him to feel like they are an inconvenience.
Of course he also sends me CDs of his vacation pictures (100s of them) but that’s OK in a way because my house is a backup repository in case something goes blooey at his house.
She probably doesn’t know that it’s an issue, I know most of my relatives wouldn’t even think about something like that. Tell her you can’t open the files (ok a little white lie can spare some feelings) and you want to be able to see her pictures, could she put them on a sharing site instead of attaching them blah blah blah. If she thinks people can’t see her baby pics the way she send them I bet she will change her ways.
shizaru
Having attended the “2 Can Play At That Game University (and Tatoo Emporium)”, why not send her something in return? How about creating in MS Paint, a nice 5 Meg bitmap file that plainly states “Now do you see what a pain this is?”
Just a thought.
Repeat after me: zip the file if it exceeds 1MB. The best revenge is to craft an attachment some 10X the size of the offending attachment, and send it right back.
I think also that one canset one’s e-mail settings to either bounce back e-mails with sufficiently large attachments, or to strip the attachments out of the incoming e-mails.
A process that would be almost completely useless for the person described in the OP.
She is sending large jpeg and avi files, and zipping such files has very little effect on their size. They need to be compressed using image or video editing software.
I use an email client that does not require me to open an attachment if all I want to do is read the email.
I have a friend who I like to look at his pictures. He was on a big computer on a fast broadband and it took some frank splainin that my little 600Hz box with win-98 on a bad dial-up could not / I would not even bother to try. He was a newbie but it did not take him long to get the point and I did hook him up with Ifranview and now all is well.
But a propper email client means they can’t clog you up unless you can’t refrain from clicking on the attachment.
I see your point, but she is a close relative, strange as she may be…and I don’t have many living relatives left. Thats why I open them I guess.
I could easily set my email to refuse her attachments, but I don’t want to do that yet. I think I’ll try to talk to her about it (again). Its just that after all of these years I thought she’d understand the file size stuff by now.
Yes, we all realize that there are many different and better ways the emailer could handle the situation, which is, I believe, the actual POINT of the pitting.
Do you have a gmail account? Gmail displays attached photos as thumbnails, so you can still look at the pics and not have to download them if you don’t want.
The 23-meg AVI would choke, though; attachments can only be 10 megs with Gmail.
I tell these people to delete my email and use a yahoo account I set up for these people when they send such large crap. If they slip up once more I set my email program to autodelete (from server) any mail from them - I let them know that they are now blocked and can only reach me through that yahoo email.
Since Yahoo is web based I don’t have to downloa the attachments.
Somebody from my high school class somehow got hold of my e-mail address and put it on an announcement list for a reunion (I forget when, but I’m pretty sure it conflicts with a subsequent engagement). Then, the bozo started using the list for miscellaneous “amusing” picture collections and video attachments. :rolleyes:
I finally set up a filter to bounce stuff from that address.