Emailing an Elephant: how to send a large file
Emailing an Elephant: how to send a large file
"Hallelujah!", you cry as you complete the finishing touches to the project that you have devoted a lot of time and energy to- which could be anything from a Powerpoint presentation for work, editing your corporate video, cropping and resizing photos, to completing your dissertation paper for school. However you soon discover that your work is not done when you realise that you can't email it out to the right people. Why? Because your email server isn't capable of handling attachments of the size that your all-singing and all-dancing software can produce. As far as your mail server is concerned, you are trying to email an elephant!
Most email servers can't handle large email attachments which creates a two-fold problem. When sending an email attachment the maximum size you can send depends not only on the attachment size limit that your own mail system has but also on the size that the recipients' mail system will accept.
Gmail , Hotmail and Yahoo have limits of 25Mb, 10Mb, and 20Mb respectively. For a list of the most common email providers and their attachment limits, click here. Using the photo example, when you consider that a typical JPEG format file on a 10 megapixel camera is typically around 3Mb or in the larger RAW data format is around 10Mb you can see that you don't need to email many photos before your email service will grind to a halt. In short, the end result is that the sums just don't add up and you end up with your email program going on strike or emails being bounced back telling you that your elephant is undeliverable.
So how do you get round this? One approach involves splitting your files so that you can send them through your usual email servers. However, this is rather old school and involves your recipient having to glue the file back together once they have received it. This is just hassle everyone could do without.
Another approach is to compress your files or to zip them up and then send them. However there are very few who want to spend their time having to compress files or having to zip them. You just want to be able to email them as normal- right?
A much cleaner and user friendly approach is to use a large file sending service. The basic idea is that you send an email using their web-based services, uploading your large email attachments. The large attachment, which can be any file type, is then put on a server and your recipient is sent an email from the service with a link to the attachment, including your original message. The recipient(s) then click on the link to download the file(s). This gets round the limitations of your and your recipients mail server problems and enables you to send a large file without any hassle.
There are many large file sending services available with the most well known being YouSendIt, MailBigFile, CuteSendIt and Tonsho. They all offer free and paid accounts with the paid accounts enabling you to send larger files and providing business functionality such as the ability to brand up the download page. The major differences between each of these services is the size of file you can send through them and how you send your files.
While the typical size of file you can send through one of their free accounts is fairly standard at around 100Mb the difference between them is the maximum file size you can send through them with a paid account. While YouSendIt, MailBigFile and CuteSendIt let you send files up to a maximum 2Gb in size, Tonsho stands out as enabling you to send files up to 5Gb with their accounts. Considering that the software we have sat on our PCs and Macs is generally churning out larger and larger files with each new release (even if you are not creating fancier files) then making sure you use a service that will meet your needs now and in the future wouldn't be such a bad idea. If you are producing large pdf documents, presentations and average sized videos that you need to share by email then you will need a 5Gb service to meet your needs now.
The other big difference between the services is that Tonsho is the only one that also enables you to send an email from your usual email program (including Outlook) if you prefer. You just write your email as normal, attach the file as normal and Tonsho removes the large attachment in the same way as if you used their web-based service. The only difference is that you are limited to sending a maximum file size of 100Mb. If you need to send a larger file, you just use their website.
If you are unsure of which service is going to suit you the best and whether you do want to put your hand in your pocket, starting out with a free account, even if it is just to do some trial sends of smaller files is probably the best place to start. You can then get a feel for the service and its usability. Click here to try one out today!
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