How do I send someone a large file?

In Why are emails I send with attachments not being delivered? I discussed some of the many, many problems with emailing large attachments.

We think of email as point-to-point: we send, then receive. In reality, that's not how it works at all. There are several intermediaries that are responsible for getting that message from "us" to "them". An email message can travel across many servers and machines along the way. It's not something we have control over, and it also contributes to the reason that excessively large emails are frowned upon by most email providers.

Email was never really meant as a way to transfer large files. That ability to attach files was added as a convenience, but the way email is encoded and transferred just doesn't make it a very efficient way to move large files.

The alternative is conceptually very simple: upload and send a link.

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Say I have a file, InternetSafety.pdf, that's somewhat large, around one megabyte, and I want to email it to you. Your first reaction would simply be to attach that file to an email and hit send:

Because of the way attachments are encoded in email, the resulting email is probably about around 20-40% bigger than the attachments, so let's say 1.25 megabytes to send that 1 megabyte file.

The other approach is to first upload that document to a location accessible on the web and then send a link:

That link is maybe 45 characters long. Most importantly it's much smaller than actually including the document itself, and not likely to trip any attachment-related filters.

And all your recipient needs to do is click on the link to download and access the file.

In fact, as an added benefit your recipient gets to choose!

When you attach a large file to an email you're often forcing your recipient to download it, whether he wants to or not, and whether he has a fast internet connection or not. By uploading and sending a link, you're giving your recipient a choice to download or not.

Unlike sending your file in email where the file is expanded slightly as it's encoded for email and then copied from client to server to server, this file is copied in its original size exactly twice: once when you upload it, and once when your recipient chooses to download it.

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I know the very next question you have: "that's all great, but where and how do I upload to someplace that people can see on the internet?"

There are many possibilities...

• You probably have some web space already, ready to use courtesy of your ISP. Check with them to see how you should access it, and how big it is. It's typically perfect for exactly what I described above, regardless of what types of files you're passing around.

• If you're primarily sharing pictures ... use a free photo sharing site like Google's Picasa, or Flickr or any of a number of other alternatives. (Check out Photo Sharing Nuggets for more tips in this arena.)

• If you're primarily sharing videos ... YouTube. If you're concerned about privacy, you can choose with whom to share your videos.

• If you're primarily sharing Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, consider using Google Docs, or similar tools. Not only can you import/upload existing documents, but you can edit and collaborate with others.

• If you have your own web site you already have a place to upload files, just as I did in my example. There's no need for them to be visible on the site; you can just upload and provide people a link.

• Search for "free file hosting". There are many. While I've not had experience with any of them, they're very commonly used for exactly this purpose. Many will have upload limits (often measured as many, many megabytes) in their free version, with even higher limits for a small fee. (MediaFire is an example that looks interesting.)

• If you're still bent on using email, search for "large email" or similar terms. You'll find that there are many services that specialize in this area. Just remember that just because you can send a huge file doesn't mean that your recipient can receive it; it will depend on the technologies used. The best solutions here will boil down to some form of managed file hosting where your recipient is sent a link to the file.

With so many alternatives to using attachments, and so many problems if you do, it seems like there's little reason to continue. A little bit of research, a little bit of education, and you can send smaller, faster emails that more reliably get to the people you intend, and they can then access those nifty photos, videos, documents or other files that you've been trying to get to them.