EMAIL HUGE FILES
DON’T ‘zip’ attachments – here’s a better way to compress them
We know many of you still like to send files via email. However, most email providers limit the size of attachments – Outlook.com’s maximum is 34MB, while Gmail and BT’S is just 25MB. There are other ways to share large files – Google Drive and Dropbox, for example – but they’re not as convenient and you might not want to upload confidential files to an online server. Here, we’ll show you how to compress large files to a fraction of their size before attaching them to your emails.
STEP Download Peazip from www.snipca.com/38895. It’s 1 available as an installable 1 and portable 2 version. The latter lets you run Peazip from a USB stick. In our example, we’re using the installable version. When prompted, select the ‘Standard installation’ option 3 – this adds Peazip’s functions to the right-click menu in Windows, which we’ll be using later. You will also be prompted to choose which archive formats you want Peazip to open by default. We’ve set ours to be the default for all but ZIP files, which Windows handles perfectly well.
STEP We want to email a plan of our home that we’ve
2 created in Sweet Home 3D ( www.sweethome3d.com). The file (called Home.sh3d) is around 34.2MB (34,177KB to be exact 1 ), which means it’s too big to send using any of the main email providers. We’ll therefore need to compress the file before emailing. You can compress files using the ZIP format in File Explorer (right-click the file, select ‘Send to’, then ‘Compressed (zipped) folder’ 2 ), but it won’t reduce the file size by as much as Peazip, nor will you be able to secure the file with a password.
STEP Open File Explorer (press 3 the Windows key+e), navigate to the folder containing your file, then right-click the file, select Peazip, followed by ‘Add to archive’ 1 . You can add multiple files to the same archive by selecting them all (hold down the Ctrl key while clicking) before rightclicking. Peazip will now open, showing your selected files in the top section 2 . If you want to add more files, simply drag them into this section. To remove a file, select it, then press the Delete key.
STEP Peazip lets you choose from several
4 compression formats. The advantage of ZIP is that anyone you send it to will be able to extract its contents without having to install additional software (Windows lets you open ZIP files within File Explorer). However, the 7Z format 1 creates far smaller file sizes, so we’re going to use that here. To reduce the file size further still, we’ll select 7Z’s Ultra compression method 2 . It takes a little longer to create and extract the 7Z file, but by only a few seconds.
STEP Peazip lets you secure your files with a password. You can tell
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Peazip to generate a secure password for you by opening the Tools menu and selecting ‘Create random password…’ (or just press Ctrl+f). The latest version of Peazip sets the default password length to 12 characters – you can change this to fewer characters, but we recommend leaving it set to 12 (shorter passwords are easier to crack). Click ‘Create random password’ 1 , select the generated password 2 , then press Ctrl+c to copy it before clicking Close. Now click ‘Enter password…’ and paste it (Ctrl+v) into the two boxes 3 .
STEP Make sure you’re happy with the
6 name of your compressed file and its save location 1 , then click OK. Peazip will now create the 7Z file. It took just over 20 seconds to compress our Sweet Home 3D file, which we could then access using File Explorer and attach to our email. As you can see, the 7Z file is just 3.6MB 2 – an impressive 89 per cent reduction of the original file. In contrast, using Windows to compress it using the ZIP format resulted in a much larger file of 13.5MB 3 . The amount your files are compressed will depend on their format. JPEGS, MP3S and most other media files are already compressed, so adding them to a Peazip archive is unlikely to reduce their file size by much (if at all).
To extract the file from the compressed
STEP 7 folder, you (or the person you email it to) will need to right-click the file, click ‘Extract…’ 1 , choose where to extract it to 2 , then click OK. Note that if you’re emailing the file to someone, they will need to have Peazip installed (or an alternative compression tool that supports 7Z files). Additionally, if you set a password when creating your file, they’ll need to enter it before they can extract its contents. For extra security, you could send this password separately via a text message or Whatsapp.