Mail Attachments

in Tiger's E-Mail Program

Presented: October 25, 2005

by Al Seper

Although this presentation describes how attachments work in Tiger's e-mail application Mail, most of this information will apply to any version of the Mail application in OS X (Jaguar, Panther, etc.).

What is an attachment?

An attachment is a document (or file) that is sent along with an e-mail message (but that is not part of the main message). Often pictures, videos, programs, or spreadsheet files are sent as attachments, because most e-mail programs allow only plain text in the body of a message.

When you include a document/file with an e-mail message, you are said to be attaching the file, or sending it as an attachment. For example you might have a spreadsheet file called accounts.xls that you can include as an attachment to your message to someone. However, the most common type of attachment is a picture!

Indicating the Presence of an Attachment in an E-mail

On most e-mail programs the presence of an attachment is indicated by a paperclip symbol.

If you receive e-mail messages which contain attachments, but don't show a paperclip anywhere, you can get the paperclip to appear as follows:

  1. Choose View > Columns > Attachments
  2. An additional column will appear on the right which will show a paperclip whenever an e-mail message contains an attachment

Getting Photos into the E-Mail

There are at least three different ways to attach a photo to an e-mail message:
  1. Create an e-mail message; locate the photo file; drag and drop it into the body of the e-mail message;
  2. Create an e-mail message; click on the "Attach" paper clip icon; a window opens; use the window to locate the photo file; click on it; then click "Choose File" button;
  3. Open iPhoto; locate the picture, click (once) so that a blue box appears around it; click on the e-mail icon (stamp); wait; a new e-mail message will appear with the photo already attached; proceed as you would normally.

A Problem with Attachments

  1. As the number of pixels on digital cameras grow, their photos become larger making them more difficult to send as an attachment
  2. For modem phone connections (i.e. dial-up) the maximum attachment size is approx. 2 megabytes
  3. For Shaw Cable or Telus ADSL the maximum is approx. 6 megabytes.
The solution is to compress the photo files before sending the e-mail message.

How to Compress Photos before Sending them

Once your photo is attached to the e-mail message, the size of the attachment will be shown in the bottom left-hand of the window (in KB or MB).

On the right-hand side of the window, you will see a "drop-down" list button labelled "Actual Size":

Click on the two black triangles to the right, and you will see the size choices Small, Medium, or Large:

Click on one of them, and see how this reduces the overall size of your attachment. When it is small enough, send the message as usual.

Receiving an E-mail Message with Attached Photos

The attached photo can appear in two forms:
  1. Actual Picture (visible in the body of the message)
  2. File Icon (click grey triangle above body of message)

Actual Picture

To save the picture, click on it, and drag it out of the e-mail window. You can either drag it to your desktop, or into another window (e.g. your Pictures folder).

To save to iPhoto, drag the picture onto the iPhoto icon in your Dock (Note: this only works in Tiger; in any other OS, you must open iPhoto first, and then drag the photo into the iPhoto window.).

File Icon

  1. Click triangle to show File Icons.
  2. To save, click on Save button; can choose All or Selected Photos anywhere on the computer including loading into iPhoto.
  3. Alternatively, click on "Slideshow" to view the photos as a SlideShow (only in Tiger)