How to Write a Professional Email #6

With the availability of cheap digital cameras it's now easier than ever to fill up your computer with highly detailed photos of cats. Cheap hard disk drives and the ubiquitous nature of broadband internet connectivity have further distanced us from the idea that we can't amass enormous feline photo archives. So what do we do with all these pictures depicting a cat trying to open a doorknob, chasing a laser pointer, or clawing up somebody's leg? We email them of course! But herein lies the problem.

You'll really need to scale and crop your image appropriately or one of the following situations can occur:

• The message is rejected by the mail server because the attachment is too large.
• The person opens the image and sees a gigantic eyeball because your eleventy-billion-gigapixel camera takes images so detailed that your nose hairs can be counted even when you're not taking pictures of the inside of your nose.
• The camera managed to get a reflected image of you taking the picture, which you can only see when it's big (and you're naked)
• The recipient of the file is on a dial-up or cellphone connection and has to pay for minutes. Even though the cat in a paper bag is hilarious, they still get angry with you.
• IT decides to check what all your mail traffic is about and discovers that you've been having an affair with your boss.
• You fill up the Microsoft Exchange server with useless crap and cause the email system at work to go down.

In order to prevent any of the above from happening, scale your images first in a program like Paint .NET, Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro before attaching them to the email. Most camera software even supports basic crop and resize features; you probably already have a program on your computer to do this.

The rule here is: keep attachments under 2 mb, or just start a flickr website like everybody else. If you need to email somebody a large picture resize it down and save it as a jpeg or png file. If they want to count your nose hairs, they'll ask for the high resolution file but it's safe to assume that they won't.