Attachments are an ideal way to transfer documents and send messages with them at the same, the primary platform for attachments is email, where there are standards set for how attachments should be encoded. This covers everything from security ie encryption to filesizes that are safe to send across a connection.
Technipages Explains Attachment
Email attachments are a very common way for sending documents, the documents are encoded and sent alongside the text of the email to the recipient, most email clients accept attachments, with some offering to save them to the drive and others including software to open certain types of attachments such as PDFs directly.
Email attachments have long been a chosen method for hackers to send virus-infected documents, it is generally a good practice to only open attachments from people that you trust when you were expecting an email attachment from them. Email attachments do not have a standardised file size limit but most service providers will set their own limits primarily to protect their own services from abuse.
Attachments can pose a security risk and thus some message services don’t allow them at all. It’s possible to attach BAT files for example – these are files that, once opened, start executing a series of processes that can’t be easily stopped – some of them can overload a computer so badly it simply freezes and shuts down. For this reason, you should only ever open attachments from trustworthy sources, and never from ones you don’t recognise. Also, only ever open files with file extensions you recognise such as DOCX or XLSX.
Common Uses of Attachment
- Email attachments are one way to transfer files from person to person.
- Attachments to messages can pose significant security risks if not monitored properly.
- Different from plain text missives, attachments are self-contained files connected to the message itself and have to be opened separately, often in third party software.
Common Misuses of Attachment
- Attachments in emails refer to font changes or formatting options.
