Looking for inspiration for this week’s blog, I decided to have a look at some earlier blogs to see if anything needed – and was worth – a re-write or a recycle
The first thing that struck me was that the first of these blog posts that was to be a regular one (weekly then, fortnightly now) was in November 2010. Over ten years ago. Really?
Moving on to February 2011, I read my post on “Emailing Large Attachments” and was struck by just how much of the detail of that post is still exactly the same today. You can still not be guaranteed that any email attachments over 5mb are going to get through, many email systems still have a limit on size of attachments of 10mb, and Gmail still allows attachments up to 25mb. You might have thought that those limits would have significantly increased over 10 years as files have become larger, the internet has become faster, and sharing/collaboration has become more common. Not so.
Maybe the reason that there has not been pressure to increase the size of email attachments over that time is that these days we often store our files online and most of these cloud services (such as Onedrive and Dropbox) have a method for being able to “share” files with other people by providing them with a link to access and download the file(s) directly from the cloud storage.
However, when I think of the typical profile of my own IT support clients, I would say that most of them don’t routinely use online data storage. For them, the method of sending large attachments that is probably still preferable is to use an online service that allows us to upload the files to be shared to their servers and provide the email addresses (and message) of the intended recipient(s). The service then emails those intended recipients with a download link.
The links in my email of 2011 are now out of date – one re-directs to a gambling site, one to a product called “Hightail” (which may or may not be the same product as before under a different name), and one has gone from a file sharing site to an online storage site, apparently without any file sharing.
So what would you use nowadays to share your files with someone else if you don’t routinely use cloud storage? I would recommend “WeTransfer“. You can send up to a huge 2gb of files with the free version of WeTransfer and you don’t even need to create an account (but you might find it easier to create one if you use their service often). Also, you can send the same files to up to 10 different recipients with a single transfer operation. Intended recipients of your files are sent an email by WeTransfer (with a download link) that allows them one week to download your files. What is more, you, as the sender, receive an email confirmation when a recipient has downloaded your file(s).
There is also a “pro” version of WeTransfer that offers benefits including:
- Your files can be made available for download for as long as you want
- You receive 1tb (that’s 1000gb) of online storage for your files
- The download limit increases from 2gb to 20gb
To use Wetransfer without creating an account, just go to https://wetransfer.com/ and complete the box on the left.
