Prefer photos compressed in zip file rather than imbedded in email

David,

What version of OSX and Mail is your daughter using?

Have her test by making the message Plain Text, to see if this impacts the behavior with AOL.

Mail does not intentionally embed images in email messages, but it might appear this way if she is using Rich Text Format when sending. See:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=151536

but, this is not entirely on target since you are using a Mac, and if she is also using 10.4.x and Mail 2.x, but related.

My guess is that AOL's server is altering some things. If you want to conduct some tests, feel free to email me, and I will devise some appropriate tests to find the best way for her to send to you. My email address can be found by clicking on my name to the left.

Ernie

David,

I would like to see one of your test messages, prepared with iPhoto and Mail. However, one other factor to ask about, is what are the selections in the dialogue to email from iPhoto, regarding including titles and comments? I would recommend that neither be checked.

I am conducting some tests, as I type this response. The test, including neither titles nor comments, and sent after making the message Plain Text, contains NO indication that it would be problematic to AOL, because no HTML characters are present.

To check your messages tested, open a message, click on View, and in the pull-down place the cursor on Message, and choose Raw Source -- look for any HTML control characters in the resulting Raw Source display.

Ernie

David,

Thanks for your email -- was it meant to have any attachments? I would like to conduct a test, but would need to send to your AOL address.

However, one way to cause Mail to send a zip file, is to Export the photos (rather than use the Email button) to a folder, and attach the folder to the new email message. Then, if you have selected to have all attachments be Windows Friendly, Mail will zip the folder. With the Export Command, you can also select to resize photos, from original size.

Ernie

Is there any way to use Apple Mail and have the pictures zipped?

Depending on the format of the photos, zipping may not shrink them at all. For example, JPEGs are already compressed and zipping doesn't result in any savings.

Duane,

I agree, but I think the central issue, here, is how AOL's mail server deals with multiple attachments. In general, it has always been best to send a single photo to an AOL recipient, unless they are zipped. With the issue David is confronting, zipping the folder of multiple images may have benefits beyond size reduction. It is not that the individual photo files must be zipped, but rather that multiple files need to be zipped into a single folder.

I haven't done any recent tests, but in the past the AOL servers, used with basic service, would themselves zip items over 100 KB -- that went away with broadband access, but it is still problematic.

I am looking forward to AOL's offer of free accounts, starting in Sept, so that I may do some more current testing, using IMAP access.

Ernie

As I mention in a post to HTML question in this forum, I believe the only thing that distinguishes "embedded" from "attached" images is some tags in the message -- it really doesn't make much sense to talk about them as separate files until something processes them into such after receiving what is really a single transmitted message.

IOW, Mail (& every other MIME-compliant sender app) always sends the pictures in the email itself, so it is a question of which tags it uses with them & how processes use them that determines what you see at the receiving end. Ideally, the only processing occurs at the receiving end, but in reality the servers may apply processes before final transmission to the addressee. For example, many free email services insert promotional ad blurbs into the body of the message. A few, particularly AOL, can strip the non-text content off the message as a parental control feature or at the request of client software & deliver (or not deliver) it as individual files, sometimes substantially altering the content or encoding as yet another "feature" of the service.

Long time AOL users may have noticed such things in the pre-OS X days -- if you sent multiple attachments via the old AOL client, it would automatically convert them to a .sit file for uploading & (in theory at least) AOL would automatically serve them as .sit files to Mac clients & .zip files to PC clients. (What David S. sees now with the OS X AOL client is the equivalent of that, less the conversion between .zip & .sit.) Using the AOL client also used to -- & maybe still does -- change some file associations so that the "owner app" (the default app that opens the file) is the AOL client.

If you have the Mac AOL client installed, you may notice that it is on the list of "open with" apps for many, many file types. Ironically, it is happy to open & play System 7 sound files & will become the default for opening them since OS X doesn't by default provide any app that registers with launch services to do this. Similar things happen with other file types, particularly those that are common with PC's but less so with Macs, or are basically proprietary versions of compression formats licensed by the once-mighty AOL & still floating around the web because their use is as free as all those AOL client disks it was once impossible to avoid. (For example, if you occasionally want to compress files into .sit format & don't feel like paying for Stuffit, you can do so with the AOL client.)

Anyway, the point is once you involve the AOL client in the equation, you can no longer be sure what you send is what a recipient will receive, over & above whatever the client email app does to process the message, or anything else that occurs after a message is sent.

In my experience, the best approach for images or anything else you want to arrive unaltered is to first "encapsulate" every file into a single zip file with the Finder (actually BOMArchiveHelper, if you want to be technical about it), & then attach that to your email. This pretty much keeps services from mucking with it in any way: even if they split it out from the text of the message, they treat it as one, non-graphic file that can't be displayed inline, no matter what the tags or anything else say they can do with it.

David,

In the matter of your daughter using iPhoto and Mail, to send emails of multiple photos to your AOL account, I have new experience. I have now added an AOL account, and I am accessing it as an IMAP account in Mail. Conducting the same tests as I did with you (using no zipping and sending from one of my normal accounts), the message and its photos, in each case, is received in good order, and the images are not embedded.

The access was almost instantaneous -- no delay.

I have not added any AOL software to access the account with their mail program.

This would seem to point NOT to the AOL servers, per se, but to something in the access via the AOL email program, with the problems you have been having.

Ernie

In the AOL for Mac OS X application, if you
drag a group of photos into the attachment
area, they are automatically zipped ...

This is true for any group of files, not just image files. The application lets you optionally compress a single file or send it as is, but if the file count is greater than one, all files will automatically be compressed into a single one for sending. A preference setting ("AOL" menu -> "Preferences..." -> "Mail") lets you choose between zip & sit (Stuffit) compression formats. In the same preference pane, you will find other mail-related options, like saving sent or received email, notifying you before opening received files containing images, & so on.

A separate preference pane, "Downloads," controls received file behavior, including automatically uncompressing received files, deleting the compressed version after extracting its contents, etc.

... which I consider an advantage.

The application has its strong points & its weak ones. Because it hasn't been updated for several years, it doesn't take advantage of some features of Tiger, notably Spotlight searches. The built-in browser is an older version of Internet Explorer, which isn't compatible with many web pages, so if you click on links in email, you are likely to have problems. The work around is to copy the links & open them with another browser, but this is somewhat clumsy.

Worse, selecting the "Helpers" preference pane (used to set built-in browser options for handling web page content) hangs the application because this method is obsolete, & you must force quit the application to recover.

The app also doesn't give you access to some of your AOL account's mailboxes, most notably the "Spam" one. Since AOL puts messages it considers spam in this mailbox, on occasion a legitimate email may end up there, so it is worth checking it. Mail.app allows this, as does the web mail interface, but it is a sorely missed feature of the AOL OS X client.

I don't see any way to set that up with Apple Mail.

I don't either, short of using Automator and/or AppleScripts to build your own 'zipper-attacher.' I haven't actually tried this, but it looks feasible, if less elegant than the drag & drop method I suspect you would prefer.

Still, overall I find Mail.app to have enough advantages over the AOL app that manually zipping files for sending isn't enough of a drawback to make me want to use the AOL app anymore. However, you might find it best to use the AOL software to send zipped files & Mail.app for everything else.

You are welcome.

Regarding the AOL spam folder, thank you for letting me know about it being available under the "Mail" menu -- I had never noticed it there! However, it isn't as easy to use as through Mail.app, since you can't actually open anything in it through that menu item, only move a message to the "New Mail" catagory, & open it from there. In Mail.app, it is treated the same as the other AOL IMAP mailboxes, so you can sort, search, open, or move messages from it to other mailboxes directly. I find this more useful for messages that I'm not sure of from subject & sender info alone. But to each his or her own.

Regarding zip vs. sit compression, I can't think of any compelling reason to use .sit format anymore, although it might be useful when sending multiple files to Mac users still using OS 9 or earlier & the old, pre OS X AOL client software.

One thing to consider: I'm not sure the AOL for OS X application uses OS X's "native" zip compression utility (BomArchiveHelper) or its own built-in routines. (It does use its own, built-in sit compressor.) This means using the app for compression may not create the latest & most compatible or efficient version of the compressed files. Occasionally, this might result in problems for the recipient. If so, manually compressing the files before sending with OS X's version should remedy that.