Skip to content

Dial-up users: Are you tired of waiting for email with large attachments?

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

 Outlook Filter

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Tags:

2 thoughts on “Dial-up users: Are you tired of waiting for email with large attachments?”

  1. Lars

    Of course, sometimes you want the big file even if it might take an hour to download. So to automatically delete all emails with big files is problematic.

    I have Outlook Express and Earthlink, so maybe my technique is limited to that setup.

    1. An email seems to be taking forever to receive.
    2. When your patience is up, disconnect your dialup. When Outlook gives you an error message, just accept it and then terminate the Outlook program.
    3. Dial your connection again.
    4. Now go to Earthlink’s webmail site. You will find the big message listed and you can see who it is from and the reason it is so big.
    5. If you don’t want it, delete it.
    6. If you do want it, you can download the attachment right from webmail, or you can start Outlook again and it will automatically start loading it again.

    I wish Outlook would list the messages before starting the downloads, but then I wish for a lot of things.

    Hey, Rick, I can’t believe you had something for dialup users. I hardly ever go to your site anymore because you do everything with video now. At least you aren’t doing the capcha thing anymore.

Comments are closed.