Attaching a file to your message

You can attach files to your message, but it's best to keep the total size of your email under 10 MB, as some email gateways will reject messages larger than that.

Here's how to add an attachment:

The Attachments window will give you a list of your message's attachments. Click the "+" button to add a new one.

Why attachments appear to grow in size

When you attach a file to your message, you may notice that the attachment size listed in Direct Mail is roughly 33% larger than the file size listed in Finder. For example, if you attach a 1 MB PDF, Direct Mail may show it as being 1.3 MB in size. The reason for the discrepancy is that files must be encoded in a special way before they can be attached to an email message. This encoding process usually increases the size of the attachment by about 33%. In order to help you gauge the size of your outgoing email, Direct Mail shows you this larger size.

Why some attachments are zipped before sending

There are some kinds of attachments that Direct Mail will automatically compress into a ZIP file before sending. These include folders, bundles, and file packages. Direct Mail does this in order to make sure that all email servers and email clients are able to correctly download and display the attachment (and because Internet email only supports "flat file" attachments).

Editing an attached file

When you attach a file to your message, Direct Mail makes a private copy of the attachment and saves it inside your Direct Mail project. If you edit or update the file after it's already been attached to your message, Direct Mail won't see the changes. You'll need to remove the attachments and then re-attach.

Customizing attachments per recipient

Direct Mail does not support custom attachments for each recipient. Should you need this functionality, we instead recommend using Direct Mail’s mail-merge feature to generate custom URLs for each of your recipients. Here is an example:

Let’s pretend that your list contains three customers. You would like to send each customer a file that is just for them. First, upload all of your files to a web server. Make sure that each file name is unique for a particular customer. For example, you can use the customer’s ID number in the file name.

Next, import your customer list into Direct Mail, along with each customer’s ID number (imported into the “Custom 1” column).

Next, edit your message to include a link for the customer to download their file. You can use a mail-merge tag in the link’s URL, to make it unique for each customer. For example:

https://example.com/customer-files/[uri:custom 1].jpg

When Direct Mail sends out your message, the [uri:custom 1] portion of the URL will be replaced by the value from the “Custom 1” column in your mailing list (which contains the customer ID number). This will result in a custom URL unique to each recipient, like this:

https://example.com/customer-files/1.jpg

https://example.com/customer-files/2.jpg

https://example.com/customer-files/3.jpg

Each recipient can use their URL to download the file that is just for them.