#122 Why not to attach dot.doc files... My recent "Top Ten Reasons to get your Press Release Trashed" has brought a flood of email from readers thanking me for the rant. The "Top-Ten.com" site picked it up and distributed the piece to their mailing list with thousands of readers as well. So, we're really hoping people will read and heed its warnings. __ Many people wrote to ask "what's a dot.doc file?" -- which sort of puzzled us since it's the file produced by the most popular program in the world, MS WORD. The only thing worse than attaching a dot.doc file is sending email with MS Outlook with the html encoding turned on. Both these practices purvey the utmost in self-centered ego to any experienced online user. What prompted me to write this month's column was not so much the letters, but one dot.doc file I got yesterday. It was close to a megabyte, but contained 16K of text. It ballooned because of an embedded Logo weighing in at over 800K ... 360dpi tif file. This is a bit extreme for a 1.5 inch circle logo. If you have to have that logo in your file attachment, just make sure you don't send it to me. __ Using another example sent in recently, we were held hostage in email for several minutes while a 251,195 byte file sluggishly downloaded. This file didn't have any graphics in it, and the actual (unstyled) text came out to only 8,718 bytes. This means the file had 28.8 times as much code embedded than it really needed. Outlook users who keep their HTML option turned on are stealing nearly as much. __ Let's do some math. Suppose this was one of the larger PR firms (they're pretty big) and that day they sent the attachment to all 600 users in the news-serve editors' list. That amounts to: 145,486,200 bytes MORE than they would have needed to send. At roughly 1K per second throughput on a busy day, the scrap baggage of this email cost end users 145,487 additional seconds (or roughly 2,424 minutes, or 40 hours) of wasted time. __ At an average wage of $15 per hour that amounts to $600 spread across the employers of the various publications. __ In terms of the vastness of the web, $600 and 40 hours doesn't seem like a lot does it? Yet considering there are (an estimated) 500,000 email messages sent per minute, if only 1% of those carry a similar dot.doc file, that amounts to roughly $3,000,000 in lost wages -- or roughly 1,212,000 minutes of email. (over 20,000 hours or 2.3 years.) Add to that several million teenagers all line camping while listening to MP3 files and you don't have to wonder why people are complaining about slow web speeds, and web site sluggishness. Rather than dumping this burden on the bandwidth and your intended reader, why not: a) build it as a simple text communication? b) ask permission, or c) distill it to an Adobe Acrobat PDF file? Nine out of every ten dot.doc files we get in the Design Center mail box are attached to unsolicited email promoting something, or asking us to buy into something else. The PR managers have been paid to bring in new editors, customers, or ecommerce accounts. Except when I open those files they look sort of like this. (picture.) That's because I usually peek at files in the flow of reading email, NOT later opening them in MS Word or some other monster word processing program. Obviously when greeted by this, I'm not at all interested in the message, but rather getting out of there as quickly as possible. __ Aside from these problems and burdens, if you look closely at the code embedded in ALL dot.doc files, (above) you find the writers' hard drive tree, directory structure, files and file folder names, and list, all the paths to the file, all the revisions, and encoded strings of characters that could be passwords, network gateways or other information the user would appalled to know was being made public. A crafty hacker could utilize the information for who knows what. (Note here that the program BBEdit allows me to see usable code colorized in green. That's the code a knowledgable programmer can actually use -- for good or evil purposes. Consider this Next time you think about simply attaching a document on your hard drive to email, first consider: a) What information does it really contain? b) How big is it, and how long will it take to download? c) Are the formatting, fonts and graphics absolutely essential to the message? d) Could it be better purveyed, faster, easier and more universally by using another method. If you must attach a dot.doc, fine, just don't send it to me. OUTLOOK Users: You may be stealing too. This comparison. over 30K with html coding, and under 16K without. Your email is taking you TWICE as long to send, and TWICE as long to receive when you send it with html coding. Is it worth it? You may think it is, but the end user may not. I get an average of just under 1,000 emails a week. Do the math. __ Go to your Tools menu, pull down OPTIONS, click on the Mail Format tab, and pull down the "Send in this message format" options to select "PLAIN TEXT". Your reader will thank you when they read your email. __ Now your message rings true and clear, and NOT your decorations. __ Your user will thank you, and you'll get your email out faster. Questions? Comments? Okay then, thanks for reading... good day. Fred Showker is a designer, consultant, writer and speaker. He has published 60-Second Window and DT&G Magazine online since 1990, and is director of The Graphic Design Network which includes The Design & Publishing Center at www.Graphic-Design.com. (1994) He was a co-founder of both The User Group Forum on America Online (1987), The User Group Network at www.User-Groups.net, (1994) and the Designers' Bookshelf (1996) He originally founded Showker Graphic Arts & Design in 1972, has been an avid computer activist and supporter since 1984. Got Comments??? back to the 60-Second Window Index, 60-Second Lobby . . . or: The Design & Publishing Center. / . The User Group Network. / . Design University. / . 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