"SAS" wrote in message
news

I hope this is not too stupid! I want to compress the photos I send
with
my emails. I have dial-up and it takes so long. Is there a program I
can
download or buy to do this.


You don't mention WHICH version of Windows you are using. In Windows
XP, the Paint program got updated to let you save in .jpeg format. This
is a compressed image format which means you lose detail. Usually the
detail lost isn't significant but if the image is already degraded then
converting to .jpeg will make it look worse. Paint will let you choose
the compression ration (i.e., how much detail gets dropped out) as will
many other image programs. This type of "compression" is called "lossy
compression" because you will lose detail.

You could try compressing the image file (the format of which you did
not mention) into a .zip file to see if there is a decent amount of
compression. This won't lose any detail but might not compress by much.
The other lossy compression techniques will reduce detail to make the
file smaller (and the resultant file will not be compressible using
archiving formats, like .zip or .rar, and may actually increase the size
of the file).

ALL e-mail - and I do mean ALL e-mail - is always sent as text.
HTML-coded e-mails include text tags for coding. Encrypted e-mails
encode the message but the content is still text. Binary docs whether
attached or inline get converted (or encoded) into text sections within
the body of your e-mail. The encoding from binary to text results in
the size of that content mushrooming to 1.5 to 2 times, or more, the
size of the original content. Say your e-mail provider restricted you
to sending e-mails that are 10MB maximum in size. You adding a 6MB
image to your e-mail could make it mushroom to over the 10MB quota
per-message (or over the 10MB quota for the recipient's account - just
because you can send it doesn't mean the recipient can get it).

If you send lots of photos and do so often then start hunting around for
places where you can upload your photos and provide a URL link in your
e-mails. Your recipients can then quickly download your much smaller
e-mail and then decide if they want to yank a copy of the photo you
wanted to send them. Sending large e-mails isn't only a problem on your
end (the sender) but can also a problem for the recipient to retrieve.
I use the personal web page space alloted to my by my ISP. I can then
provide simply URL links in my e-mail to the photo and without forcing
them to signup for some online photo retention service in order to see
my photo.