A member recently complained that one of our council email distribution lists was broken. The evidence? It was rejecting his message to his fellow council members. No, it didn't say why.
Investigation quickly showed that the list service program was working fine. I had the member send me a copy of the rejection message and of what he was trying to send. The rejection message said "mail action aborted; exceeded limit; 7812 kB maximum message size." Sure enough, his message was that big, and the list had an "etiquette" limit of 2 megabytes. His response? "But it's only four attachments, only about a dozen pages. They're just some candidates' bios."
That was true enough. There were only four attachments. Three of them were one page each, all between 25 kilobytes and 35 kilobytes. No problem. But the fourth attachment was over 6 megabytes by itself. True, it was only nine pages long. A bit wordy for a bio, but page count wasn't the issue.
The problem was that it was an image PDF resulting from a scan. It all had been scanned at high resolution and high color, as though it were nine large glossy photographs. There was no good reason. Everything except a letterhead logo and a signature on the cover page was dirt-ordinary black-on-white print. Maybe the little spot of color was important to the candidate. But most likely, no one thought about what would happen if nine pages were treated like high-quality photos by Jim Brandenburg.
What could the candidate have done differently? Scanning at a lower resolution would have helped, of course. Scanning in black and white, not even grayscale, let alone color, would have helped. But it would have been best to print to PDF, not print then scan. If it was vital to the candidate that the logo of his firm or the signature be in color, the best solution would have been to scan just that, then insert the image(s) into the Word or WordPerfect document, and then print to PDF.
What could the council member have done differently? He could have had his email program set to show file sizes. Or he could have read the five lines of the error message to notice the part I quoted. Sure, there were a couple of technobabble words. But with only five lines, the "exceeded limit; maximum size" bits should have been close enough to plain English to be seen.
What could I have done differently? I could have used the problem as a teachable moment, and might have saved the lawyer from someday missing an e-filing deadline due to rejection of an overlarge scanned document to be filed.
Of course, what I actually did was to reset the list's etiquette limit to ten megabytes temporarily and ask the member to re-send, because I'd "fixed" what was "broken." I took the easy way out, on the theory that most the council members probably receive their email at the office over a T3. Tough luck for any council member using a modem. (Except that I've now re-instated the two megabyte limit.)
The broader issue, of course, isn't any of the three actors' actions. It's that our computer programs aren't set up to make relevant quantities (the math) clear to us. We can see how big a page is, on paper. But a page electronically might be tiny or gigantic. The problem is, that to most users, the behemoths are invisible, and nothing in their programs highlights the invisible sizes. Sure, they could learn how to find out the sizes. But they shouldn't have to make the effort. They're busy practicing law, and have better things to do. Email programs and scanning programs should add default settings that make file sizes obvious, big and bold and unavoidable: maybe something like a CPU meter or a speedometer, always up front to make the invisible apparent.
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