Attaching files to email messages is common practice and works well enough most of the time. If you need to send a large file (or several files), however, you may discover that your email system won’t let you do so. Worse yet, while your system may allow you to send the message, but the recipient’s system may not be able to cope with it! Over the last few years, the popular mail systems increased the maximum message size to the following limits:
Many other systems, though, are limited to a maximum of 5-10MB per message, and in any event, even 50MB may not be enough for some jobs. So, what should you do if you need to send a larger file? Using your MailAs mentioned above, some mail services do support fairly large attachments, so if, for example, you want to send a 20MB file from your Yahoo account to a Hotmail user, go right ahead!
A technically superior method is to publish the file(s) on a suitable web page, and send the recipient a link to that page. They can then then download the file from that page. There are hundreds, if not thousands of web sites offering such services. For the sake of simplicity I will cover just two, both of them free.
DropboxIf you have DropBox, you can rope it into service as a large-file sender. In your Dropbox folder there is a special folder called ‘Public’ which is what we will use.
You can test the link by pasting it into the address line of your web browser and pressing [Return]. In all likelihood, you will get a ‘Save As...’ box, prompting you to save the file on your computer. With some file types (e.g. JPG), the file will be displayed instead, and you (or rather, your correspondent), will need to right click on it and choose to save it to disc. An interesting feature of this method is that the attachment is ‘live’. Any changes you make on the file locally will be reflected on the copy on the web, so you can continue editing the file even after sending the link, and the recipient will, at any time, download the version of that time. Similarly, if delete the file from the attachments folder the recipient will not be able to download a fresh copy of it. Also, a note on privacy. Using the Dropbox’s ‘Public’ folder is much like using an ex-directory phone. No one knows about it, but it’s not password protected. If you have a truly sensitive document, you may want to use a different method of sending, or at least encrypt your document before publishing it. Finally, if you want to send multiple files, you can create a folder with all the files in the attachments folder and send the link to it. Unfortunately, this is is a little more complicated than the above. Try to work it out for yourself, and if you can’t, call me! Use a file sharing siteThere are many web sites for sharing files, some specifically designed for the purppose we dicussed, and others for general file sharing. I like to use www.2shared.com , which has an upper limit of 100 MB per file. It’s main screen looks like this:
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