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E-mail Attachments and Dreaded Diseases
Unless you've been in a cave recently, you have read and heard about the proliferation of viruses that at the very least jam e-mail servers and at the worst destroy valuable data. A consultant friend of mine deletes mail with attachments unless he has been told specifically what he is being sent. In our organization I suspect we'd all be in trouble by adopting this philosophy so the time has come for an aggressive campaign with each other to work a little smarter and avoid unnecessary problems. I don't know about you, but since people discovered the "Send To" feature in Microsoft products, my mailbox is filled with attached files. Sometimes one is infected but normally they just add to that dreaded "You mailbox is over its size limit" message. Very rarely are these documents ones in which I must interact and return. Because our software integrates so well, it is fairly easy to write a document, copy it, and paste it into a blank e-mail message. Take this article for instance. I am creating it in Word and could very easily do a "File – Send to" and mail the document to the editor. However, for safety, I will go to "Edit – Select All" and copy the text. In Outlook I will paste the text and the same purpose is served. The text can again be copied from the message and pasted into the newsletter. Sure, there are times attachments are pretty important. A friend and I have done a couple of magazine articles by collaborating via e-mail. You guessed it – the article was an attached Word document. Internal collaboration is fairly easy, however, by storing files in workgroup shares and just e-mailing shortcuts to files. Next month I will give you some handy shortcuts and some "rules of the road" to avoid frustrating problems with attachments. For this time, however, start the thought process each time you send an attachment to someone. Ask yourself, "Is this something I could just paste into an e-mail message and accomplish the same result?" Ann Johnson
[Editor's note: This was written for Ann's departmental newsletter]
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