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These are the recommended format for attachments of various types. These file-types are recommended because they balance support from operating-systems with file-size compression.
All images should be sent as JPEG (for photos) and PNG (for line-art) files. These formats work best on most operating systems. JPEG should be used for photographic images because it offers superior compression compared to PNG. PNG should be used for line-art or non-photographic images because JPEG is a "lossy" compression scheme and using it on images with flat color areas can introduce visual distortions (see illustration).
Short texts should be quoted in the email body, however a larger text can be attached, there are three recommendations for this.
PDF Files are best for formatted documents and can be created by using the "File → "Export as PDF" menu item in OpenOffice. PDF Files retain all formatting and can be opened on all major and most minor operating systems.
MS Word documents end in .doc and can be created from the Save-As dialog box. Very complex documents can sometimes loose some formatting when exported to this format. Most word-processors on most operating systems can open MS Word files.
Plain Text files can also be created from the Save-As dialog box, but cannot contain any formatting whatsoever. These files can be opened, by their very nature, on all operating systems. Plain-text, however, should not be preferred for this purpose.
Presentations should be sent in PDF format. Presentations containing multimedia elements should have the multimedia elements extracted into seperate files (see below) and shoud be "zipped" (also see below) up with a PDF of the presentation
Audio should b sent as an MP3 file. Very short audio clips can be sent as PCM-WAV files.
Video should not normally be emailed, due to irregular support for various audio/video codecs and container formats, you should share a link to a video file, hosted on a video site such as YouTube as these sites use bonna-fide cross platform technology.
If, however, a video file must be emailed directly, it should be AVI or MP4 container format with AAC or A52 audio and H.264 video., 4:3 aspect ratio with a resolution of no greater than 640x480, preferably 320x240.
If you know for a fact that the recipient of the video will be using an older version of Microsoft Windows, you may use WMV container format and WMV2 video and WMA2 audio, however this is not recommended.
If you know for a fact that the recipient of the video will be using some type of UNIX operating system, you may use OGG container format with Theora video and Vorbis or FLAC audio, this may be better supported on some Unices.
Please note! Video-files tend to be huge. Many mail servers cannot handle messages larger than ten megabytes, the Vistua Groupware servers can handle messages up to 25 MiB in size (of which 20 can be attachments), however if the recipient's email server cannot handle an attachment of this size it will be expunged or the entire message bounced.
A computer archive file contains multiple files within itself, similarly to how a directory contains files and other directories. Unlike a directory, however, an archive is a single file and can be emailed.
Some archives use file compression techniques to reduce the size of the archive. The most popular such type is the zip-file, ending in ".zip". You can make zip-files with the arK program that is included with KDE.
Other types of archives, such as tarballs, which are native to UNIX, and Stuffit files, which are native to MacOS should not be used as email attachments as they lack cross-platform support. UNIX and MacOS support most types of archives, but the same cannot be said of MS Windows, which, natively, only supports Zipfiles
Zip-files are sendable through Groupware email, subject to certain security limitations.
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