Now. This article is pretty cool – as it has both things that I like – a list of 99 tips and it is about email. A site IT security has consolidated 99 tips to make email more secure and make you more productive with it. Topics include Etiquette, Communicating & Effectiveness, Mobile Email, Productivity, Folders, Filtering, Email Attachments, Tricks, Hacks, Backup, Software specific tips, Privacy and Security. The section Handling email attachments catches my attention: Hacking Email: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips – [IT Security] 52. Don’t forward attachments. Except in a work environment where it might be expected, check with your intended recipient before sending attachments. If it is a large file, consider that sending it may block their account from receiving additional email because they exceeded their disk space quota. Attachments also take up company resources and eat up bandwidth unnecessarily. For example, if you send a PDF file to a group of, say, 10 co-workers, the mail server sends 10 copies of the same file and uses up 10x the space. 53. Include an excerpt. If it’s sufficient/ appropriate, include an excerpt of the document (instead of attaching it) in the body of your email. 54. Send a link instead. You are better off sending a link to something, if the material is already online, or you can easily put it up on a secure site. 55. Share a file. If the file is not online, and if you have the right to put it there (i.e., no copyright issues, not company-sensitive material), then use a filesharing service such as AllPeers, which lets you define who is in your buddy list. No one else can access the document. There are also several online spreadsheet and word processor apps these days. See Google Docs and Spreadsheets or Zoho. Both are compatible with “Office” applications like Microsoft Office and Open Office, and let you share documents. Once you’ve set a Google Doc or Zoho document to “share”, you can send colleagues a link.
