Email or file limit blues?
April 2, 2008Do you need to email a large file to someone but your ISP or company has a limit on how much you can send?
Well, if you have your own website, you can FTP the file to a private area, then tell the recipient where it is. If you use Skype or Windows Live Messenger or similar services, you can transfer large files that way. Or if your recipient has a web-based email account such as Gmail, you can send it to that email address, if it’s less than 20 MB.
But what if you don’t have your own website, Skype, or Messenger? Or your recipient doesn’t have Gmail or similar?
Then you can try one the free services such as:
Each has a free service, with various limits on number of files or file size. All have a paid service giving you lots more benefits. But if you only need to send large files on the odd occasion, a free service is probably all you need.
Update 25 November 2008: I had some very large documents that I needed to work on at home. The client’s email system would not allow the files to be emailed so I couldn’t get them from my Gmail account, and the client’s system didn’t have an IM program I could use. So I jumped on to YouSendIt to test it out. It worked great! I’ve since transferred a few large files back and forth between the office system and mine. So far, so good…
[This article was first published in the December 2005 CyberText Newsletter; links last checked November 2009]
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Just for the record, here are two more services that I have used in the past year. I did not choose them; others asked me to send them files using these services. The files got through safely (large .jpg files, .doc files, and .pdf files).
http://sendspace.com/
http://www.mailbigfile.com/
[...] You have a file that is too large to email to someone even after you’ve zipped it. Either their email system won’t accept it or yours won’t let you send it. You can use alternatives like a Gmail account (20 MB limit) or Skype or an instant messaging service or an FTP service like YouSendIt (I blogged about these options before). [...]