Pasting Photos in Outgoing Mail

A reader is concerned about changing their mail service from AOL.  “I use AOL mail because I like to copy and paste photos right on to the mail without them being an attachment. Is there any other e-mails accounts that allow me to do this?”

\The short answer to your question is that yes, there are.  The two e-mail servers that I verified this on were Gmail and Yahoo, because those are the two servers that I use.  I’m sure that it works just as well on other e-mail services.  Frankly, though, I would recommend Gmail because they have a great anti-spam filter.  When I was using Yahoo as my primary e-mail server, a LOT of spam got through to my main e-mail box, and several of my non-spam e-mails went to the spam folder.  Since I started using Gmail, I never get spam in my main box, and rarely have my non-spam fall into spam.

It’s actually pretty easy to do this using a keyboard shortcut to paste, as there is no paste option in compose e-mail.

First, choose the photo that you’d like to copy and paste into your e-mail.   Bear in mind that the maximum upload size for either Gmail or Yahoo is 25 MB, which is the same as AOL.  Outlook.com and Hotmail are each 10 MB.  The largest is Mail.com at 50 MB.  Once you find your image, right-click on it and click COPY.

Next, create a new e-mail, address it and put a subject line, make sure that your cursor is in the e-mail itself instead of one of the other fields, and then use ctrl+v to paste the image into your email.  (The image here is from Gmail because, as I say, that’s my preferred service.)

Note, that you can grab the corners of the image to adjust the size.

Then send your email and all is happiness!

I hope that this helps.

~ Randal Schaffer