E-mailing large files 4

[Ingenuity]

I require help from those engineers who are more digitally intelligent than I...

Whilst this is not a "structural" issue it is possibly an issue that many a "modern" engineer is faced with today in this digital and electronic age.

I have a structural report that I authored in MS WORD and includes several digital photos (about 10 to 15 or so JPEG's) included in an appendix. The report total about 20+ pages. When saved as a WORD file, the report, is 10 MB. I conveniently conveted it to an Acrobat PDF and it is now 5MB.

I need to e-mail this file across the other side of the world...i tried compressing with Win ZIP but it was not too efficient only giving me 1 or 2% compression...

So now i attach it to my e-mail and send this single file...but it will NOT send and i get an error that it times out. I think (know?) it is the fact that the file is sooo large (well sort of, depends on what you call large) that it is unable to be sent.

FYI...i am DSL, with a very large ISP, and i called the ISP's tech department (not sure how tech they really were) and they said i have 10MB capacity (which may have nothing to do with my e-mail file size but rather the server capacity they give me?). They suggested i email it in 1 MB packages.

I ended up sending the WORD file as text only, then 4 other emails with the photo's - total 5 e-mails. I made each e-mail about 1 MB or less - real pain. Now my report looks (is!) disjointed and unprofessional.

I could always reduce the resolution of the JPEG's, but that is a pain too.

I would be interested in fellow engineers who know how to solve this problem...or maybe at least share my frustration!

TIA

 

[ben1212]

check out a program called winRAR. Here is the link:

http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10097-100-7366830.html?tag=st.dl.10001-103-1.lst-7-1.7366830

what a long annoying link. Download the 40-day trial version, it is the full version but after 40 days an annoying "register me" box will come up everytime, otherwise it is the full version.

I let you figure out how to use it (I use it all the time, it's easy) check the HELP options. I will give you a hint though, after you hit the ADD button you need to type in the VOLUME SIZE, this is the size of each file you want to send.

The program breaks the file down into small files with the extensions .R01, .R02, .R0#, and a .RAR file. You can send 2 files or you can break it into 20 if you want. The person on the other end will need winRAR also to unRAR the files, i.e. put them back together.

I hope this helps.

Benjamin Feldt
Austin, TX

 

[CarlB]

I've found the limit of many e-mail servers is right around 4 to 5 megs - so your report may be just barely too large. You could send it in 2 parts, such as through page 40 and 41-xx.

If you often have large files, you can make the file available at your company's web page (almost required nowadays) via an 'ftp' server, from which file can be downloaded by anyone with the password.

I'll bet this file size limitation will go away before long. Wasn't it just about 3 years ago you had to 'encode' and 'decode' anything other than text file attachments?

Good luck,

Carl

 

[Ingenuity]

thank you ben1212 and CarlB.

 

[sc]

Another possiblity is the time out setting in your email program is relatively short, which may be fine for smaller files but no good for larger files.

The time out setting is to allow reasoble use of servers so that the program doesn't spend too long looking for the server and tie it up on other users. If you have a large file the email "times out" because it cannot recieve a response from the server in the specified time out limit.

The time out setting is usually in the email settings under options or preferences on your menu. Mine is set for 2 minutes and has proven satisfactory for files up to 8Mb in size.

Regards

sc

 

[sc]

As an extra note pdf files, jpegs and other similar files are already in a compressed format, hence there is no real advantage in applying addition compression via winzip and similar programs.

sc

 

[Ingenuity]

sc,

thankyou. my e-mail program was set to 1 minute server timeout so i changed it to 5 minutes...still no success.

i then went to my ISP's FAQ's and they stated i can email upto 5 MB - so i redid the report (took out a few photos) and it saved as 4.5MB but it still will not thru.

Hmmmm....if you have a 4.5MB file can the ISP server increase its size (or something) so that it thinks it is larger than 5MB and hence will not send?

 

[WKTaylor]

Try the following:

1. Reduce the "size" of Your images, if lower quality images will be acceptable [lower DPI or smaller X x Y size].

2. "Zip" your original MS Word file using winzip. I think winzip is more efficent at compressing and archiving an MS word file with photos, than translating the file to the *.pdf format, then "zipping".

NOTE: zipping is useful for emailing, or shuffleing data around to various storage media, since many files are compressed into one file archive. This saves a bunch of time "inserting" or saving many larger files into messages or directories. Regards, Wil Taylor

 

[nades]

Use chainsaw. This will solve your problem.
Goto :

http://www.schmeusser.siw.de/software/chainsaw.html

and download the program. very simple.

 

[austim]

Hi, ingenuity,

re your post of Feb 12.

I believe that the answer is "Yes - the size of the e-mail message in transit is about twice the size of the file being sent".

I don't know the gory details, but was told quite some time ago (when my ISP message limit was 1 MB or so) that the 'problem' goes back to the time when e-mail was invented. At that time, e-mails were only meant to be simple text messages.

If you only want a system that will send text messages, then you don't need to be able to send the full range of ASCII characters, just the letters (upper and lower case), numbers and some punctuation marks. So the original message coding system was based on a limited set of characters.

(Much of what follows may be wrong in detail, but I believe that the broad principle is somewhere near right).

Along comes a need to send pictures, program files etc, with the full set of ASCII characters, so what could 'they' do? What 'they' appear to have done is to encode each of the 'new' characters as two characters from the original set. (Or they may even have had to use two characters for every one of the 256 ascii characters - I don't know)

I fully expect some correction to this explanation from any of the multitude of tech experts who know much more about this than I. However, I do know that there is a significant difference between the file sizes that the originator and recipient see, and the message size that the ISP sees in transit. And it is the latter size that needs to be below the ISP size limit.

I would reinforce the comments that say there is little point in trying to compress a *.pdf or photo file. I think you best line of attack is to split your large files with one of the many file splitters and re-combiners that are around. (I use Z-split).

 

[Tankman650]

I had the same problem sending files via email to the middle east. Files at or over 1 M will not go through. When I zip a large file down to less than 1 M it had the same problem. It seems that email is a text based animal and converts binary to text which expands.

They way I got around this was to post the files on my server (ftp) and send the address to the recepient. The zip file was password protected so if someone other than the person I intended got the email, they could download it but not unzip it. I phoned ahead with the password.

The only problem is that the receiver has to connect to the

http://WWW and

down load from their isp. Most times this is a very expensive call for them but many times cheaper than FEDEX!

Tankman

 

[Ron]

Ingenuity...I have had your same problem many times. One solution I have found is to optimize the images (there are several programs available...try XAT.com). These will reduce a jpeg file from a couple MB to KB, without resolution loss. Do this before importing the image to MS Word, then convert all to pdf. Works well in most cases.

Ron

 

[CTruax]

Not all POP mail servers are created equal.
Some limit the maximum size of files.
Split large files into multiple parts using the DOS version of PKZIP. It was originally written with the idea of taking a large file and zipping it into multiple files of say 1.44MB so that they could be transferred onto floppy disks.
The program is free and efficient.
PKUNZIP at the other end will pack the segments back to the origional large file.

 

[shp6]

Hi all:

Based on my experience, MS Word files are getting huge while the photos are directly copied and pasted into the Word files. The way to reduce the size of the Word files with photos is as follow:

1. open the photos with Photo Editor or equivelent.
2. Select the photo and copy it.
3. open MS Word and strik on "enter" and hold it for a while to create a blank page or two.
4. in Word, click on "edit", "paste special", and choose "picture".

This way, you can move the pictures anywhere you want and the picture will move with text, too. The size of the picture can be change by right click on the picture and "format picture". Based on my experience, you can place a lot more pictures than the direct way but still have a small size file.

Another trick is to close your "auto saving" option in Word bucause everytime MS Word saves the files automatically, it needs a lot of memory to do so. If you do not have enough memory for it to do so, you will see a big "red cross" on these pictures and there is no way to save them back (as far as I know). Thus, it is better to turn the "auto saving" off and save your file manually. But remember to save your files periodically manually.

It is the way I do photos in Word and it helps. I hope everyone has a successful experience with your editing and emailing.

shp6

 

[deejay]

I believe that there is an option to link the photographs instead of inserting it. If you can do that then the photos and the text document can be sent as separate packages.

 

[chandr]

I've been using hotmail, yahoo, and other free mails. The box-sizes range from few upto 10 mb. The behavior is all the same: can receive upto the stated box-sizes but 1-mb limit per single attachment is there on sending. Since the current mailbox I'm using is 10mb, I usually WinRar the files into .rar, .r00, .r01, ..., then attach and send in 1 mail. With hotmail or yahoo, I had to send many mails with 1-mb attachment each.