1. A method comprising: determining from transfer criteria whether to provide less than all of an electronic mail message; selecting a portion of the electronic mail message; reducing a resolution of the selected portion of the electronic mail message, wherein reducing the resolution of the selected portion of the electronic mail message comprises a part of downcasting a portion of at least one file associated with the electronic mail message; generating a downloadable, reduced copy of the electronic mail message from the reduced resolution, selected portion; and downloading the reduced copy to a user; wherein downcasting the at least one file comprises downcasting at least one of an audio file, video file, a multimedia file, an image file, and a graphics file; wherein selecting the portion of the electronic mail message comprises selecting the portion based upon determining from transfer criteria whether to provide less than all of the electronic mail message; wherein reducing the resolution comprises reducing the resolution based on transfer criteria; wherein generating comprises providing to the user information relating to the at least one file associated with the electronic mail message, wherein information relating to the file comprises a filename, a file type, an actual file size, estimated download time, and at least one of a file creation date, a file modified date, version information, color format, color resolution, estimated transfer speed, and a download priority; further comprising: identifying a type of the at least one file based on at least one of a file name extension, a file-type-specific plug-in, a transcoder, and an identifier inserted into the file, wherein the inserted identifier comprises indicator characters, control characters and character strings, and wherein identifying a file type based on the inserted identifier comprises parsing the file to determine the identifier; downloading the reduced copy to a plurality of users; setting at least one flag indicative of at least one user email handling preference; downloading the electronic mail message subsequent to downloading the reduced copy, wherein downloading comprises trickle downloading.