Are Your Bits Flipped?

14. How Email Attachments Work (and Don’t)

A stapler may yield undesirable results when used to attach a document to your laptop’s screen.

Here’s a question I get frequently in response to the books and articles I’ve written about email: “Why aren’t attachments working the way I expect them to?” The specifics vary from person to person. One reader wonders why graphics and PDFs show up in the body of a message rather than as separate files. Another wants to know why attachments sent from a Mac don’t show up properly in Windows (or vice-versa). Yet another wonders how to know, in advance, whether an attachment will get through to a recipient ...