I'm sorry...

[chhotii]

...but I get pissy when someone sends me an MS Word attachment when they could have just as easily copied the info and pasted it into the text of the e-mail itself.

Comments

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

how about when they turn it into a jpeg, import that into a powerpoint, then send you the powerpoint attachment?

see, i work for marketing execs...

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

how about the clever person who figures out how to get around the 5 MB per email limit, and sends a 150 MB spreadsheet in all its multi-media glory, to EVERY single person by mistake at a 1000+ person dept... because a) the mail server wasn't set up to hold one copy and forward a pointer b) the server used an alias that was "corp wide" and a "common word", thus the accident, and c) they allowed attachments at all.

it brought the mail server to its KNEES. ah, the hilarity. the pathos. managers who couldn't function without paper trails, were printing 20 copies of memos and MAKING SURE you took one.

eventually, they turned off attachments altogether. required a pointer to an http/ftp area. less work really but how people complained.

#

my moderately arrogant and dismissive take on it

[frotz.livejournal.com]

I used to be deeply irritated by that behavior, but then I realized that it was an excellent prefilter, as the mail I get which is so constructed is quite reliably not worth reading.

Sadly, I do still feel compelled to read such things at times in the work context, but it's far from my top priority and still an excellent earmark of "ineffective communicator not worth the trouble to read" (on a par with emailing URLs with no explanatory text), though oddly enough this sort of thing wasn't at all a problem with the marketing execs I used to work with.

Once upon a time I'd have made an exception for big prepared documents that were being jointly developed, but these days that's all handled by the "I've updated {the web site|the repository}, have a look" method.

Re: my moderately arrogant and dismissive take on it

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

i worked at a place where someone set up the mail server to silenty drop anything with improper attachments. no problems!

#

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I truly hate that as well. Big ball of fuzzy fury at the innate stupidity of it.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

I hate that, too. Luckily, I can make most mailers just show it to me, but yeah, it's stupid as hell.