Email Attachments: What Are They and What Kind of Formats Can They Be Sent?

The e-mails are an important part of our work or studiessince thanks to them we can send and receive information to different people who are anywhere in the world.

It is very useful to send files or archives so that the recipients have them in an easy, fast and simple way. Any file format can be sent, regardless of its size.

In order for you to know everything about how to send an attachment in an email, you should read until the end of this post. In addition, we will show you what the maximum weight allowed is and where they are stored according to the email platform you use.

What is an attachment in an email?

When we have to send an email and send the sender certain information that we cannot include in the body of the messageeither because of its size or format, we need to incorporate a file or any other information that will be attached to the email. The latter is what is known as an email attachment..

The procedure to attach an attachment is very simple, although it will depend on the messaging platform that we use, usually represented by a clip icon. We simply have to click on it and a file browser will immediately open to choose the one we need.

We must bear in mind that there are different classes of attached files that depend on the encoding or not of the same, being UUEncode, base64, binhex, and quoted-printable the most used forms. In addition, we can also classify these attached data according to the place where they are stored. But we will see this topic later.

What formats can I attach to an email message to share it?

Among the great variety of email platforms that currently exist, we can use any of them since they support a very wide variety of file formats that will be sent to our recipient.

The most common extensions are the ones detailed below:

• txt: This is the format of an Excel file, so we can send any version of a spreadsheet. Also included in this extension class are xls and xlsx.
• doc: We also have the possibility of sending a Microsoft Word file, with which we can attach images and videos. As with Excel, we would have to name the versions of word processors as docx.
• pdf: If we need to send a file that has a storage format in which the recipient cannot modify it, or can see it in the same way that we sent it, we can use this Adobe extension.
• zip: This kind of format is ideal for sending a complete file or a large file. To do this, we must compress it before sending it to the person who receives our email, when it reaches the sender they will have to uncompress it and just open it.
• pptx: From an email we can also send files with a Power Point storage format. This kind of attached documents that we send by email will allow you to see the slide presentation. As with other formats, we can also include pptx versions.
• rtf: We must include this extension within the text extensions, with some variants introduced by its manufacturer Sun Microsystems, Inc.
• ods: It is also developed by Sun Microsystems and is compatible with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The same is true for a word processor with the odt extension.
• wav, aiff or au: Another class of files that you can send as an attachment in an email are those that belong to audios in what we can find these.
• avi, mpg, h264, mov, wmv: As is the case with audio, we can also have attached files to send videos.

What is the maximum weight for an attachment in an email and how to send larger and heavier files?

In the case of gmail files can be attached up to a maximum of 25MB, but up to 50 MB will be received, this is because they may be using different kinds of platforms. Other emails like Yahoo! support up to 25MB to send and receive.

Hotmail and Outlook have a lower capacity 10 to 20 meg.

But How could we do to send information with a larger size than those allowed by these platforms? The answer is easy, for this kind of situation we must host what we want to send in the cloud and send the recipient of the email a link to our archive.

To send an attachment by Gmail you must perform these steps:

• Choose “Write”.
• Click on “Attach files”.
• Press “To attach”. A file browser will open where you must choose the documents you need to send.
• Then select “Open” and after a few seconds the file will have been loaded correctly.

When you want to send an email from your Android you will do this guide:

• Press “Write”.
• Choose “To attach”.
• Choose the file you want to send.

For iOS mobiles, you will have to do this:

• Click on “Write”.
• Then press “To attach”.
• Find the file or archive you want to send.

All these steps can be done when the file or archive is of small size. In the event that we need to send a large document, we must compress it through a special program. In our case we will choose WinZip.

Download WinZip Windows

Once you have downloaded this app, you will follow this procedure:

• go to “Start” and you choose “File Browser”.
• Right click and then choose “Send to”.
• Choose “I agree”.

In case you want to do it directly with Windows 10 you can choose the file, look for the option “Send to” and press “Compressed (zipped) folder”.

Where are all the documents that I attach to my emails stored and how can I access them?

This is one of the most vulnerable situations we have in our important emails. Many times we do not know where the messages are stored and how secure they are, since there is the possibility of saving them on the server or directly on our PC.

Next, We will show you the two most used email platforms and you will find out where the emails are stored in each one:

In Google Gmail

Gmail attachments are stored on the serveronly the header is downloaded to our mobile device or computer.

But the server has a restricted capacity of GBaccording to this, once we have reached that limit, Google will notify us of the situation so that we store on some disk, or delete the emails that are no longer we need In the event that we do not free up the space on the server, we will not be able to receive emails and senders will see a sending error.

So you can delete your emails you should go to the inbox and select from manual way one by oneor by pages all the mails you want to discard.

In Microsoft Outlook (Hotmail)

Unlike the previous casewhen we use an Outlook account, whether from any platform that we synchronize our email, the emails will be downloaded to our computer. We have the option, at the time of account configuration, to choose whether we also want them to be saved on the server or deleted from it.

In order to carry out this option and remove it from our server, you must go to “Bill”then “Setting”click on “More settings” and you choose “Nope” in the section “Save to mail server”.