Here’s a question we receive quite often in our service department: “How can I send a 50-megabyte file to a customer, since it’s way too big for an e-mail attachment? Are there ways to do it other than burning a CD and using postal mail?”
For server space and bandwidth reasons, many e-mail providers limit file attachments on a message to no more that 5 or 10 megabytes in size.
This often makes it difficult to send things like high-resolution photographs or digital video files as e-mail attachments.
If burning the files to a CD and mailing them isn’t a workable option, there are other methods of electronically transferring your large files.
People or companies with their own Websites often upload large files or folders to the Web server with a file-transfer program — and send the intended recipient a user name and password to use for retrieving the files. But this may not be an option for a lot of people.
Instead, several companies offer to transfer huge files over the Internet. Instructions for using each service vary, so be sure to read the information on the site.
Pando, for example, has free and paid versions of its software for transferring files at www.pando.com, and it works with both Windows and Macintosh systems.
You can send files up to a gigabyte in size free through Pando, and the company has paid plans starting at $5 a month to send even larger files from machine to machine.
YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com) is another service that promises to transfer your big files. You can send files of up to 100 megabytes free with its YouSendIt Lite service — or files up to two gigabytes in size with the company’s $5-a-month service.
Some free or inexpensive online file-storage services like Xdrive (www.xdrive.com), iBackup (www.ibackup.com) and FilesAnywhere (www.filesanywhere.com) also let you mark certain files for sharing. This means customers can download a large file themselves from your online storage drive, rather than dealing with e-mail attachments that are too big to fly.