Degunking Windows 7 by Joli Ballew

Author:Joli Ballew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2011-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 8-2 Consider the folder structure you need, and then create it.

Manage Attachments

E-mail attachments are separate files that “ride along” on an e-mail message. Attachments can be any sort of file, but often they are files that contain content other than text, like images, videos, or sound files. This means that they are often very large—sometimes megabytes in size—and if you accumulate enough of them, they can become a huge source of e-mail gunk.

An associate of mine tells the story of a clueless employee at his firm who was sent a humorous video and decided to send it to every single person in the company. The video was 6MB in size, and when multiplied by the hundred-odd people in the company, and incorporating how many times they sent it to others, well, it completely filled the company’s already-strapped mail server. (This was some years ago, before 100GB hard drives were commonplace.) And of course, not many people deleted that from their Inbox after viewing it, creating even more gunk.

Getting back to my point: how you want to handle the attachments you get depends on what you receive, what you really think you want to keep, and where you keep it. Remember the Keep, Hold, and Pitch rules. Additionally, here are some guidelines for dealing specifically with attachments:

• Assess each attachment before saving it to your hard drive. Can you find it again on YouTube should you want to view it again? Is it on your company’s internal servers? Do you really need to save it to your hard drive, move it to a folder, or send it to others?

• Do not use your mailbase as a storehouse for attached files. When a message arrives with an attachment, immediately save the attachment to a separate location on your hard drive if it is to be retained. Otherwise, delete it. This is an especially important point to remember if your mail server has a retention policy that deletes attachments after a certain amount of time.

• Do not open an attachment unless you know what it is. If a message arrives with an attachment and you are not absolutely sure of what it is or who it came from, don’t open it to see what it is! This is how viruses propagate. Be particularly wary of files with the extensions .exe, .com, .scr, and .pif. Remember that under Windows, opening an executable file runs it! This is idiotic, but it’s a fact of life. “Opening” should mean “looking at” rather than “running,” but we must deal with Windows as it is.

• Protect your computer. Keep an antivirus utility running and up to date. Many antivirus products include a context menu item that allows the scan of a single highlighted file. If your antivirus product includes this option, you can right-click an attachment file, select Scan for Viruses (or something close to that; see your antivirus product documentation), and your antivirus utility will scan the highlighted file. This is quick insurance. Get in the

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