I have been utilizing this tip much more lately as dial-up users get pummeled with email containing pictures that haven't been resized and an endless parade of forward spam with large attachments from friends and family with high speed connections. For every one megabyte of space an attachment contains, it takes 5-8 minutes for a dial-up user to download it. Many joke emails, slide shows or movies being passed around today can be 5mb or larger…tying up the dial-up users phone line for an hour or more!  If you don't want to tell the offending parties to take you off their list, you can do one or both of the following procedures to gain some control over you email again.

Learn to use web mail

All Internet providers now offer their users a way to check their email from a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc). Almost every provider's web mail can be accessed by:

1. Go to your Internet provider's home page on the web
2. Look for a link that says "check email" or "Web mail" and click it
3. Enter your user name or email address (which ever is required by your particular service)
4. Enter your password. Yes, you do have one. If you forgot it, your Internet provider can either retrieve it or reset it for you.
5. Once logged in to the web mail page, look for the Inbox an click it
6. Your messages waiting to be retrieved will appear. Look at the "size" column and delete anything larger than 700 kilobytes (kb) or 1 megabyte…unless you really want to see it.
7. Now when you access your email with Outlook Express or other email program, the large email attachments won't clog up the works.

Create a rule to delete messages automatically before downloading

I'm going to explain the procedure for this one using Outlook Express, but all email programs have a rules or filters options where you can do the same thing. This rule forces the computer to look at the size of the message before downloading then deletes it if it meets your criteria.

1. In Outlook Express, Click Tools –> Message Rules –> Mail
2. In the first section, click the box that says "Where the message size is more than size
3. In the second section, check the option that says "Delete it from server"
4. In the third section, click the word "size"
5. Type in the size limit you want to set (I recommend between 750-1000)
6. Click OK
7. Click OK again

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Related articles:

1. Use Email Filters to Organize Email
2. A word for our Dial-up readers (and our high speed Internet emailers)
3. Spam Revisited…and Outlook Express Filters
4. Email Filters – Outlook Express
5. Solving email problems

Tags: attach, attachments, browser, delete, download, email, Firefox, Internet, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, pictures, spam, Word

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Email Tips, Riding Shotgun with Rick. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.