Attachments Are Dead

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If you send me an email with an attachment, you’ve almost guaranteed I won’t read it.

Maybe there are some exceptions to that rule, but not many. It’s 2010. There’s not really any excuse for sending me a 10MB .wmv file – I can almost guarantee that same video is on YouTube somewhere. If it’s not, I can think of a dozen different sites off the top of my head you could have uploaded it to. Pictures of your kid? Put them on Flickr, or Picasa, or better yet, just don’t send them to me.

Don’t send me an attachment. Send me a link. That 27MB PDF you just sent me? Yeah, I deleted it immediately.

Thoughts? Is this an unreasonable stance?

3 Comments

Pete Prodoehl

For almost all of the work I do, I find attachment quite useful. It’s a great way to individually share small files with other people in a direct manner. Sometimes we don’t want things pushed to the cloud, even if they are private. We do a good mix of our our private web-based file delivery system, and attachments, and it works quite well.

Posted August 26, 2010 at 8:40 pm Reply
Anne Munkwitz

I rarely open attachments. In the old outlook it was a pain to preview them but the current outlook at least segments attachments so you can preview. However, I’d much rather click through to a link.

Posted September 3, 2010 at 10:01 pm Reply
Tom Henrich

I assume you’re working with Outlook 2007 then? We still use 2003 at my office, so yeah, attachments are a pain. It’s especially annoying when working with internal employees and those of our agencies, who all have access to our internal web-accessible storage system that can handle files (versioning, comments, etc) much more efficiently.

We recently had one of our agencies’ project managers repeatedly attach the same 7MB Word document to each email. That got out of hand very quickly. And then there are the people that feel the need to embed giant screenshots of webpages rather than just use a link to said page – that embedded image gets carried through with each reply, so your chain of messages gets pretty sizable.

Hence… delete.

Posted September 3, 2010 at 10:27 pm Reply