Yeah, I said it. LAME. E-mail attachments are a horrible, terrible waste of space and time. They were a clunky solution to a perceived problem back in the internet’s infancy and now they act like 2-ton trailers attached to 3-cylinder Yugo hatchbacks.
You see, attachments aren’t a space issue per se. They may hinder your ability to send and receive e-mail because of your e-mail provider being uber cheap about hard drive space, but the space taken up by one attachment isn’t the issue. It’s the fact that attachments are duplicated, over and over and over again. One person sends an attachment, it gets forwarded, then replied to, then forwarded and replied to and CC’d and BCC’d and pretty soon you have 30 people with a copy in their in-box, a copy in their sent folder, and a copy saved to their hard drive somewhere.
The real problem with e-mail attachments is the risk of outdated material. With so many copies of documents that tend to change with new revisions, there is certain to be a trail of nonsense to sift through, and that takes up valuable time.
The solution to e-mail attachments is to post an original copy of a document in one location, then give everyone access to view it. Not a new concept. In fact, that’s what you’re doing right now. You and hundreds of other people are reading this information, which was published one time, and stored in one location. Granted, it’s now published, and not password protected, so anyone can see it, but there are plenty of systems out there that allow you to secure information for specific authorized people to read.
So, the next time you think you need to pass along an attachment, think about how you can upload it, then simply share it, to ensure it’s always up to date and it doesn’t get stuck in transit for being too big. There you have it. E-mail attachments waste so much time, in fact, they’re inspiring me to waste time expounding upon how they waste time.
