Tip: Reduce the Pain of Replying to or Forwarding Large Attachments by Using Browser-Based Mail or Blackberry
Posted on December 10, 2007
I use the Lotus Notes client (I assume this information applies to Microsoft Outlook against Exchange as well, but I haven’t verified) on my laptop for most of my corporate email access. By default, most people work in “online” mode, meaning that the email client is communicating directly with the server, just like when in the office. In this situation, replying to or forwarding emails with large (multi-megabyte) attachments can be painfully slow since attachments have to travel the network both ways – the email client has to bring the attachments down from the server to your machine and then send them back out again with the outgoing message. (If in fact you choose to keep a copy of the sent message, the Lotus Notes client* will actually send the attachments to the server twice, once for the recipient and once to save a copy in your mail file, for a total of 3 trips across the network!**) And since most residential Internet connections are asynchronous, the outbound delay is multiples of the inbound.
A trick for avoiding this delay is to use either your Blackberry or browser-based email access to reply to or forward the large attachments. In both cases, the attachments are kept server-side; the data never traverses the network to your Blackberry or browser.
* Tested with Lotus Notes 7.0.3 client against Lotus Domino 7.0.3 server.
** Verified using Ethereal packet sniffer.
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