Email part 3, Opening the attachment 'big money to be made'

3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?

Opening attachments can bite you on the computer bum, so be careful!

To ensure the recipient is always able to open attachments, you must first offer them something amazing.

I was toying with the idea to include the following in the subject line:

1. love from
2. easy money from Nigeria
3. increase the length of your nose
   
4. free Viagra to help the dead stay stiff
5. update your details from the banks of the world
   
6. secure your place in the after world
   

but I think some of those have already been taken. Damn it!

But getting back to it.
Format of attachments
To ensure the recipient can open any of my attachments I will usually only send pdf files. If I suspect the person has limited experience in using computers I will include the url to download the Adobe Acrobat Reader with a short explanation of how and why. http://www.adobe.com/au/

If I'm forced to use something other than Acrobat I will first determine which format they can accept before I send the email eg MicroSoft Word, Excel and so on.

Encoding
As suggested in Module Two notes "First: communicate about your computer systems. Sometimes, when you expect to send attachments, particularly to users whom you suspect may not be as knowledgeable as you about attachments, you need to seek information from them and to assist them in dealing with the attachment."

I would think it would be highly unlikely that many people know anything about encoding email messages or its purpose, so I would certainly not be contacting the recipient as my first action. I would either follow up the original email with a phone call or send another email without the attachment and ask if they received the first successfully. Bothering people about something that doesn't interest them is just likely to annoy them. (Hey, if I don't like someone I should change the encoding on my email.)

When the encoding fails
Below is a picture of my beautiful dog after a swim at the beach, the image of Lizzy was correctly encoded to show the jpg as intended.



Below is the email opened with a text editor that shows the picture as ASCII text.
"e-mail messages can contain only text information, and attachments aren't text" howstuffworks, http://communication.howstuffworks.com/email5.htm

Because the file I was emailing was not text, the email software is required to encode the image before sending, the encoding used was MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). If the receiving email software is using different encoding such as, uuencode, Base64 or BinHex the image will not render and you will need to do some heavy maths or some creative thinking to interpret the attachment. Below is a sample of the same image of Lizzy but opened in a text editor. The text editor is only a basic word processor and will not interpret code or render the image.



If that fails I could format the attachment in html and place it directly into the body of the email, or just use ASCII text in the body of the email, assuming there are no images.

Of course there is always fax, sail mail, carrier pigeon or I could get on my bike and start peddling. I just hope its not overseas because I may need a snorkel.