File Size Matters

It just happened again. One of my students, working on a video project tried to email me the final version. Fortunately, the TWO GIGABYTE file was too big to be accepted by the UF email server. I did receive the follow-up email asking if I knew if there was something wrong with the email server because this email wasn’t going through.

Just for context, you should know a few things.

1. I teach most of my classes online.
2. The Learning Management System (Blackboard in my case) is where all assignments are turned in (no exceptions).
3. My syllabi specifically state the only time an attachment should be emailed to me is if I ask for it to be mailed to me ahead of time.

I have had instances where the LMS scrambles certain files. Our Bb server still can’t handle Flash files sent from certain Macintosh computers. If I have a student using a Macintosh in a multimedia class, I will have that student file attach a Flash file to me. I only do this AFTER we establish the fact that the LMS won’t handle the file without breaking it.

Having a student email me a file out of the blue is distressing. Everyone knows that email attachments are the primary source of modern viruses. On top of that, UF limits each user to 100 MB of total email. A couple of large email attached videos and I am out of commission.

When someone tries to email something that is twenty times larger than the limit I can receive, there is a bigger problem. The problem is that many users have no idea how to tell if one file is any different in size than any other file. The GUI has contributed to this problem. Even Windows Explorer doesn’t show file sizes or file extensions (don’t get me started on that) by default. If you mouse-over a file, you can get this information, but many users don’t know this or don’t use the information. Even knowing that a file is 2 GB doesn’t help. With high speed Internet, it should matter… right?

Email should be words. I don’t even format my email. It is plain ASCII. I would never choose to use HTML in my email. If I want to send someone an agenda, I don’t attach a Word document. An agenda is made of words just like email. I can copy and paste words from a word processor into my email and save someone the trouble of opening an attachment… that contains only words.

Do you realize the process involved in sending someone a file attachment. Since email is based on ASCII text, the email attachment must be converted to ASCII using Unix to Unix Encoding. This makes the file roughly twice as big as the binary version. This doesn’t include the extra overhead that is created by all the formatting code that goes into most binary files. An ASCII page of text is 2k. Copy the same text into Word and it becomes 4k. UUE the 4k and becomes 7k. So attaching a one page text document is like sending three and half pages of email.

Last year I received over 300 MB of file attachments. Most were only a few megabytes. The largest was 12 megabytes. If I consider only the attachments (not the accompanying email), this was more than three times the capacity of my inbox. Most of these attachments could have been avoided if senders would send links to files instead of attachments. With all the content management systems that we use to hold our information, emailing a link to something instead of an attachment saves everyone time. If I need the information, I can follow the link and I don’t have to clean it out of my attachment folder.