Sending attachments

GAILEY

Hi, I'm hoping that someone may be able to give me the benefit of their experience...
I work from home and have just treated myself to a decent scanner, as I'm fed up of standing over my fax machine to copy lots of documents (which it more often than not misfeeds) and scanning what I need to on a flatbed scanner page by page - which takes forever too). I am very excited and plan to be more organised (as we all probably do at this time of year)
What I'd like to know is whether there is any reliable, cheap and user friendly software that will enable me to send large attachments by e-mail. Currently, I have to send any large scans in several small batches..which doesn't look very professional and which I am sure annoys the hell out of the recipients.
I don't know whether the problem is with my e-mail provider (aol) or whether it's with the size of the files ie. whether they need to be squished. I have heard of programmes like WINzip but think the recipient needs to have something to unzip them with - which would not work - is there a one that is there already within the midst of windows?
My system is windows xp professional.
Any advice would be appreciated....as I am a bit clueless:A

grumpycrab

Typically, how big are your attachments and how many on average do you need to send at once? Aol has (or had) a 25MB attachment limit (I think) and so may other providers. What speed is your internet connection?

Ignoring email for a second, another option is to post the attachments to the cloud. This may be useful if you share the data with multiple people? But adds a minor issue of how to inform your recipients of where the data is.
e.g. http://blog.laptopmag.com/cloud-services-compared-google-drive-vs-dropbox-skydrive-and-icloud

WTFH

What is the make and model of your scanner?
Is it documents or images you are scanning?
Are you expecting the recipients to print them out, or just view/save them?

As an experiment, scan in one A4 page, then tell us what size of file you have from that one page - also it's format (I suspect .jpg).

Mirno

If you're scanning grey scale images (or even better just black on white text) then the scanner will have settings for these. It will generate much smaller images.

Even with relatively mild compression you can drop the size of images without really affecting the visual quality - so unless you're dealing with the images as professional images (like a photographer or something) you can drop the size quite a lot.

Mirno

rum1

You could winzip or winrar the copy then send

Niv

The e-mail system at the company I work for will not accept e-mails larger than 10mb nor will it accept zipped files at all, so it may not be your end that is causing the issue.

Mr_Toad

When I scan documents I scan them into a PDF file. I set the scanner to accept multiple scans into a single document.

This document can be huge but you can either scan at a lower resolution and/or once the PDF file is created you can get Adobe to reduce the size for emailing.

Quorden

Depends on who you're sending them to, lots of secure customers won't accept compressed files such as WinZip or WinRar because of virus concerns. For all my personal stuff I use DropBox which is pretty easy to use but you'd best check your companies policies as for anything work related I have to use Citrix Sharefile which is more secure. Easiest way would be to tinker with the scan settings as suggested above.

googler

What do you need to communicate to others? The text that's in the documents, or something about the documents that isn't text-based?

Prothet_of_Doom

I no longer bother with a scanner. I just take a photo on my phone, convert it to a pfd and email it straight from my phone, with a cc to my work email account.

CountryGoose

These are not cheap; http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-S1300i-PC-MAC/dp/B008F05ND6/ref=dp_ob_title_ce

However I have (an older) one in my home office and it has been worth every penny. It takes document stacks, will copy front and back and can produce PDFs, OCR PDFs and JPGs easily. Lots of options for formatting size and resolution.

If may seem like a lot of cash - but think how much you value your time.