Welcome to the Power Users community on Codidact!
Power Users is a Q&A site for questions about the usage of computer software and hardware. We are still a small site and would like to grow, so please consider joining our community. We are looking forward to your questions and answers; they are the building blocks of a repository of knowledge we are building together.
reasonable to mandate sending attachments in a separate follow-up email to ensure that the recipient receives at least one message?
My new company has this IT policy for emailing attachments. Does it make sense?
The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) claims that sending attachments in a follow-up email is safer than sending a single email with attachments. The reasoning is that if the recipient's email system flags the second email with attachments as spam, they will still receive the first email without attachments and be aware that the follow-up email with attachments is missing. Without this policy, if the single email is flagged as spam, the recipient may miss the entire message.
2 answers
I think they're fixing the wrong problem, but it is a reasonable workaround... for now.
The real problem is that mail systems do not seem to trust your SMTP. Fix the underlying trust and filtering issue and one no longer needs to rely on goofy schemes like your CTO's.
While they work that out, your CTO is right that knowing about a missing message is better than not knowing at all. Ideally he or she should make it clear that this is a temporary measure while they fix the root cause. For inbox searchability (which has been seriously impacted by this policy), I recommend replying to your original message and leaving the quoted body intact when you send the followup attachment.
Some words of warning: If I were an email filter, I'd find an attachment-only email to be even more suspicious than one with relevant accompanying text. You may find that the attachments are even less successful than before, depending on many factors. Furthermore, even if this does work, any (particularly easy) way to circumvent email filtering will become a spammer practice. You absolutely do not want to still be doing this when it's an indicator of spam.
0 comment threads
In addition to what Michael said (+1), this would be quite annoying to recipients. It would be a hiccup in my workflow, and I'd think less of the sender. Their inability to fix their email system shouldn't be my problem.
If you're sending legitimate email with legitimate attachments, they really shouldn't get rejected as spam as long as the number of attachments is reasonable and the overall size not excessive. I know systems that refuse mail when the attachments add up to more than 10 Mb. When you need to send someone large files, it is better to put them in an unlinked corner of your web site, a drop box, or something similar, then send only a link. Unfortunately, some spam filters seem to trigger on such links too.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads