Today's Story

There's a woman upstairs who doesn't quite get how to ask smart questions. Her complaint today is that when she tries to send an e-mail message, "the e-mail piece" says "there aren't enough bytes".

God help me, I know what the problem is just from this alone. She's hitting qmail's databytes limit, which puts an upper bound on a message's total filesize. If you exceed this limit, you get an error that states your message size exceeded the size set in databytes.

I talk to her about it, and her story has changed slightly. Now she can't send any mail, so I sit down at her desk and send a test message to myself. Works fine. "You can send messages internally?" I ask. "Yes." OK, so she's lying about not being able to send any mail. I send another test message, this time to my Gmail account. No errors.

It's at this point I realize that some people have very linear minds: if they have a bunch of e-mail to write and send and suddenly get stuck on one, it's assumed that all messages are going to give you problems. Maybe your e-mail piece is broken.

So I ask her to try sending a message that has given her trouble and she does. I stop her just as she's about to click Send. She neglected to put the ".org" at the end of the To: address. Ugh.

She fixes it and I let her click send. The databytes error pops up. And now I know precisely what the trouble is. It's the Word document she's attached. If I check the filesize, I'm betting, it's going to be huuuge. So I ask her about it. "Where is it on the hard drive?" "I open it in Word." "It's probably got an enormous filesize." "Really? But it's just one page."

She kept hitting that point over and over again. "It's just one page. It's just one page." "It depends on the file's size," I rephrase, trying to get her to think outside the box. "It's just one page." We struggle to find that Word document.

It's hiding in her My Documents folder. It's 30MB.

She opened it up and, true to her word, it's only one page. One page of text with a tiny little logo in the upper left hand corner. Those of you who see where this story is going may stop reading now. For the rest of you, it's time to explain how Word handles imported graphics.

Word will let you put graphics into a document, and it does so by embedding the graphic into the file. Once this is done, you can resize it, move it around, flip it, or do any of a number of other operations on it. And Word has this feature where, no matter what you do to the graphic, you can throw all those changes out and start again. You can start over with the original graphic.

It was painfully clear by now that this woman had gone out and found a 30MB version of our logo and mindlessly tweaked it down until it was button-sized as decoration for a Word doc.

I spent a bit of time fixing the document for her: wiping out the huge graphic, pointing out where logos are kept on the file server, finding a 3K alternative, and plugging it back into the doc. I made a copy of the doc and renamed it with ".original" so she couldn't accidentally try to edit it or e-mail it to someone again. I showed her the different filesizes: 30MB for the old version, 27KB for the new one.

To paraphrase Nick Burns, they should teach this kind of thing on Blues Clues.