NTK used to include, at the end of each email: "Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply."
These references to the Geneva Convention pre-date the Bush administration's trampling all over them, and these days, with broadband, I'd upgrade that to 1MB, but the point still stands: huge attachments are not welcome.
So why is it that if I double-click a JPEG from a mail message, and then select part of it that I want, copy and paste it into a new mail message, it gets pasted as a TIFF (huge, uncompressed), but if double-click it, zoom to actual size, then do a partial screen grab, and drag the resulting file from my desktop to a mail message, it gets copied as a PNG (comparatively tiny, with no loss of quality)? Why can't Mail just Do The Right Thing, and compress any attachment to something smaller?
At least it told me I was about to send a 800K attachment rather than a 100K attachment.
In other news, I recently opened an email from someone at work saying "I think there's something wrong with this web site", including a Word document. Remarkably, said Word document was not just an annoying wrapper around a huge BMP screenshot; it actually included some explanatory text, and an arrow pointing to the bit of the screen shot that was the problem, and it wasn't huge.
