Tech Tips – Editing Email Attachments

When you receive an email that has an attachment, what should you do with the attachment? Most of us open the attachment within the email. This is fine if you just want to look, but if you want to do more than look, you can run into some serious problems. Editing within an email message may work, it may work most of the time, but it is not a reliable practice. There are a number of reported incidences where changes to an attachment were not saved and in some cases the attachment became corrupted during this process. So if you don’t want to lose the paper that you emailed to yourself as an attachment, practice the following.

• When you have an attachment that you want to edit, SAVE IT!!! I often save to my desktop while I am editing and latter delete the document when I am done or have saved it where I want it to stay.
• You should rename your different version of edited documents. To do this select “Save As” instead of just clicking on “Save”. All that you need to do is add a letter or number to the document name each time you edit. I usually add “v3” when I am working on version 3.
• You should keep your total email attachment file size under 3 MB.

Saving Attachments (PC and Mac users)

If you receive an email with an attachment that you want to save your should save the attachment. To save the attachment: pc users should right click on the file in the email and select save, save as, or save target; mac users would Ctrl+click and then select save. You can save the file to any place you want, but be careful the default location is often a temp folder that is nearly impossible to find.