In classic email applications, you can send email attachments from 10MB max and 25MB for webmail. Often this just isn’t enough, especially when you are working a lot with video and graphics.
How can you send large files without to much hassle?
Using Dedicated Services
There are several online services who address this issue. They all use the same process. You select the file that you want to send through a web page. Then you fill in your email address and the email address of the receiving party.
After that, your file gets uploaded to their server. Finally, the recipient receives a mail with a link to download the file.
A nice example of this, which I like to use a lot myself, is WeTransfer. This service looks nice and the free version supports files up to 2 GB.
It’s also reliable and you don’t need to register, which I find great.
Sent files remain available for two weeks. Some good alternatives are SendThisFile and DropSend.
Using Online Storage
Services like Dropbox and Google Drive offer another solution for online storage and transferring large files.
They offer better control of your uploaded files (you decide what you delete) and it’s easier to control who has access to your files. That’s why these services are safer ( e.g. at WeTransfer, everyone that gains access to your link also has the ability to download it)
Email Integration
These solutions are definitely more cumbersome than just adding your file to an e-mail. What if you have to do this on a regular basis? Isn’t there any way to simplify this?
Luckily, there are a few services that, aside from their web interface, offer a plug-in designed for email applications.
Examples are Hightail (the former YouSendIt) and Adobe SendNow. Both services only support Outlook though.
The free version of Hightail only gives you 50 MB to work with, paid versions with higher limits are available from €150/year.
SendNow costs €18,44/year. In both cases, you have to configure the plug-in after installation and enter your personal details. After that, the plug-in will activate automatically each time you try to send an attachment that’s to big for a normal e-mail.
Even the famous web mail applications have an integrated solution for sending big files these days.
Another option is Google Drive which has now been integrated in Gmail.
It’s possible to click on the Google Drive-icon (next to the attachment icon) when you’re composing a message. This way, you can add up to 10 GB of files to your e-mails, these files are then uploaded to your Google Drive. The recipient receives a link to fetch these files.
To make things more secure, you can choose to only share the files with the recipient, instead of making them available through a link. In that case, the recipient has to have a Google account to get to the files.
Outlook.com lets you send files up to 300 MB with SkyDrive.
Yahoo! Mail co-operates with Dropbox, but this isn’t available yet in all languages.
Another solution to transfer large files could be to set up your own FTP server.
Henk van der Wijk
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