How to email large files using any email program or service.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom.
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So let's get right to the question.
"Okay, I get that using email to send large files has lots of problems.
The biggest being that my ISP says that my file is too big for email.
So how am I supposed to do it?
I have a large file that I need to send to someone.
If I shouldn't use email, what can I do?"
Email is certainly convenient.
I mean, you attach a file and you click send and you're done.
The file eventually winds its way through the Internet and lands on your recipients
inbox, and they can then open the attachment, download it, whatever.
Here's a problem.
Email was never really designed for this. Attachments,
I don't want to call them an afterthought,
but certainly at the time, attachments were designed the sizes
of files that were going to be transmitted across the Internet were never conceived
of as being as large as they are routinely
today
attachments really were never intended to be the solution to this problem.
The other problem is that there's no hard
and fast definition of what it means to be large.
Some email services will consider to be a ten megabyte email too large.
Others will say 25.
Others may have different limits.
Others may have no limits at all.
We really don't know.
Even without limits,
chances are an excessively large email is going to get stalled somewhere between
your sending it and your email recipients receiving it.
So what do you do instead?
Well, as it turns out,
especially with the ubiquity of, "the cloud"
there are several different approaches that are all really super familiar,
and you've probably already got one installed on your machine.
As we speak, the best way to send a file on the Internet is not to send the file.
Let's switch over to my Windows ten machine.
You can see that I've got Windows File Explorer open on Onedrive.
Now remember what Onedrive is, and this applies equally to Dropbox
and Google Drive and a few other services as well.
Onedrive is a cloud storage service.
What that means is that when you put
a file into your Onedrive, it is placed online in the cloud, as it's called.
Microsoft servers are really all that that means.
So it's already on the Internet.
It's already been uploaded,
so you don't need to upload it again yourself by attaching it to email.
What you can do instead is send a link to the file that's already in the cloud.
Here's what I mean.
So let's take a look at this one.
I've got this file fullpuppy.jpeg.
Let's do that one.
You can see that it's three megabytes.
It's not large, but it's a fine example of
a file that we might want to transmit some other way.
It's in my Onedrive folder.
You can see here I'm in Onedrive.
I mean, the picture is subfolder, and that's where the image lives.
If I have some other file that I wanted
to transmit that wasn't in my Onedrive folder,
all I would need to do is copy it into any folder within my OneDrive folder.
That as long as Onedrive is running,
will then automatically upload that file to OneDrive com online.
And in fact, that's already happened.
In fact, that's what this little green check Mark means here is that the file is
both on my machine and it resides up in the cloud.
If I right click on it, you'll see that there are some interesting
options down here underneath the Onedrive cloud icon.
Share
being one of them, I'll click on Share.
Now, I have some options to play with before I actually share this with anybody.
I need to decide whether or not they can edit the file.
I don't want people making changes.
I just want them to be able to see it.
So I'm going to click on that and Uncheck allow editing.
You can see that there are other options here.
In this case, those are advanced.
And if there are things you want to take advantage of, fine.
They're not available across all the different services.
I'm working with the most basic here.
But by saying allow editing, unchecked,
we're now basically saying that anybody with the link can view the mail.
Anyone with the link can view this file, whatever this file may be.
With Onedrive, I could specify an email
address, and I could just send them the link, and that's fine.
If you want to do that, that's okay.
My preference actually is to just do copy link.
So
what we've done is we've copied this magical link here to my clipboard.
And now if I were to fire up an email program and create a new mail to anyone.
And let's see, we'll say here's that picture
and I paste the link.
So
what I've got now is an email that contains not the attachment,
not the image as an attachment, but rather a link to the image that's stored online.
And I can go ahead. I can send that.
That email is tiny.
It's a very small email, and it's very quick to send.
In fact, it probably is already in the inbox over at Leo@askleo.com.
What do they get when they click on that, though?
Well, let's have a quick look at it.
Let's go to our folders here.
We'll check out our sent mail so that I can see what that is.
I'm going to go ahead and click on the link.
What that's done is that's opened onedrive.Live.Com.
And there's the picture it takes a few
seconds to come into resolution and you can see now the person who received this
can see what it is they're being asked to download.
They now get to choose whether or not
to download this to their machine or just view it online.
If all you wanted to do was show them their picture, they're done.
They can now see this picture online
without having to download it to their machine.
That can make a big difference if they
happen to have a slow Internet connection, especially if you've got a large file.
On the other hand, if they want to download it, well,
sure enough, there's a download link and it will actually allow them to take
that file and download it to their machine.
As I've just done here,
lots and lots of flexibility, but that's my recommendation.
Rather than trying to attach the file to
an email, instead upload it to a service like Onedrive or Dropbox or Google Drive
or any of the others, and use that services ability to share
a link to the item and share that link with someone via email or maybe through
some other technique, maybe instant messaging or whatever.
But the bottom line is that the link is all you need to share with someone
to give them access to this really large file.
Now for completeness,
I have to say that there are, of course, a few other alternative upload locations.
If you're not into these file sharing services like Dropbox or Onedrive or
Google Drive or any of the others, there are a few other possibilities.
One is that your ISP may have given you some online space.
Check with them if they do.
If they did, then it may be something that you can upload a file to their server
and then somehow share a link to the file on their server.
Again, this depends on your ISP and what kind of service you've signed up for.
If you're primarily sharing pictures,
well, gosh Google Photos, Flicker, or any number of other sites designed
specifically for photo sharing are perfect.
I do this all the time with Flicker myself.
I have lots of photos that I share with other people on Flicker.
If you're primarily sharing videos, YouTube is great.
It's what YouTube is all about.
And again, there are other services Besides YouTube.
If you're not wanting to get involved
in YouTube itself, Vimeo is another one, and there are others as well.
Flicker even supports shorter videos,
so those are alternatives that you might want to use.
Again, this removes what you're
uploading from email and puts it in a dedicated format online
for whoever you want to have access to to be able to see.
And of course, if you have your own website like I do,
then of course you could upload the file as part of that website.
You don't have to link to it
on the website, but you've got server space by definition.
Your website is taking up space on a server somewhere.
You could put the file on your website server and share a link of that way.
And finally, of course,
if you're sharing primarily Word and Excel and PowerPoint documents,
this kind of does bring you back into the either Onedrive or Google Drive
ecosystem, but that's what those ecosystems are for.
Onedrive does a really good job
of letting you not just share your Word and the other office documents,
but letting you collaborate on them simultaneously.
Google Drive the same thing
with Google Docs with its word processor and spreadsheet.
So those are things where you really might
want to consider using those services anyway, simply because of the additional
features and functionality that they happen to offer, along with simply sharing
the file with so many different alternatives to just attaching a big file
to your email, there's really no reason to anymore use these services.
It's what they're designed for,
and it makes things so much easier and makes your email get through faster
and, as it turns out, be less likely to be flagged as spam.
Yep, attachments count links to online services a little less spammy.
Anyway, I hope that was helpful.
I hope that gives you some ideas of other
ways to share those large files with your friends and neighbors.
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for comments and more, visit askleo.com/11685.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is askleo.com.