Sending large attachments to emails (digital dictation in particular)

I'm sorry Paver Smith. It was my fault. I asked a client to send the dictation as an attachment because it was too large to be uploaded onto our website.

I didn't realise that the attachment was 70MB. In typist talk, that's about 8 hours of recordings which would take about 32 hours to type up!

So what happened today was all of our email system stopped working because of a huge fat attachment blocking the pipe. When it finally did reach me, silly me tried to open it which caused the server to use almost 100% of its resources (working overtime) and almost crashed our whole system. Oops.

There's a lesson or two to be learnt here.

1. Spend more time with your client to show different ways to use the recording device.
2. If a piece of work needs a lot of dictation then split it up. That way the work can be done even quicker by having more than one typist work on it. The document can be joined together when it's all finished and then proof read.
3. The best way to transport digital dictation is by using the special software provided so that mailboxes don't get filled up quickly.

If you can think of any more lessons please post a comment.