Every email carried five attachments
Whenever I sent a B2B business email, I attached a catalog PDF, a spec sheet, certificate photos, packing notes, and a contact card all at once. I believed it looked thorough. But overseas contacts kept replying with things like 「the attachments won't open」 or 「the file is too big and got blocked」.
Before
• 5 attachments, about 18MB in total
• Average of two days until the first reply
• 3 or 4 out of 10 emails got a 「please resend the files」 request
What we changed
The bot that drafts emails with Claude Code on our Windows device got a single rule.
At most one attachment. Bundle everything else into one shared link.
The bot on the Mac mini tidies the materials folder and produces a single link, and the drafting bot adds just one line at the end: 「Materials: link」. The shorter the rule, the less the bots wandered.
After
• 0 to 1 attachments, one link line in the body
• Average of half a day until the first reply
• Re-requests fell to fewer than 1 in 10 emails
An unexpected finding
We expected the recipients to have an easier time, but follow-up timing also got easier. Once we could see that someone had opened the link, we could send the next message a day earlier.
We did slip up once. For the first few days we forgot to set sharing to 「anyone with the link can view」, so the link would not open and three emails had to be resent. Our pre-send checklist now has one extra line: confirm permissions.
Today's small note
Care is not about how many files you attach, but whether the other person can open them right away. One small rule cut our back-and-forth time by a good margin.