I hate email attachments! Perhaps not for the reason you may think. Yes, you need to be careful of any attachment recieved in email as it may be a virus, trojan or worm. But frankly, I keep and archive most of my email and I don’t want to store the attachments in my email archive. And too many people with big-mega-pixel digital cameras don’t know how to resize their pictures or are too inconsiderate to resize them or post them online somewhere for sharing, so they just send them in email. They are too big for email!
So what do I do to avoid the size problems and security issues? There are some great web-based services to help you share files easily over the internet.
An oldie but a goodie is YouSendIt.com. The YouSendIt free version allows files sizes up to 100MB and there are limits on how many times it can be downloaded by someone else. But for the kind of one-off files that you might be sending by email, this works fine. There are for-pay services that provide some significant advantages for business that may be sending larger files often. I use this service a few dozen times a year to share large files with people. The recipient gets an email from YouSendIt with a link to the file you are sharing. They click the link and download the file. Easy! If you create an account then you can password protect the file for a small fee.
Drop.io is very similar to YouSendIt. It also has a free version with a 100MB limit on the file, but it’s free to set a password and you can also set an expiration for the file. Drop.io also has a paid service with some nice advantages for those who would use this service often enough. Drop.io is a bit different in that you create a drop or storage bin to put more than one file if you want. You can then send the link to the file to the recipient. I like Drop.io very much. Lot’s of nice features and settings. But, when you use the “Email Recipients” button, it sends the files as an attachement. Not what I want! So I always just copy and paste the link tot he file into my own email message.
Another option is MediaFire. It’s very similar to Drop.io and YouSendIt. Is fast and works well. For some reason I haven’t’ used it other than testing. So I have no real experience. But see nothing wrong with adding it to the tool box just in case.
Of course, if you are running your own web server, you could be FTP’ing a file up and sharing a link by email as well. But even people who know how to do that will sometimes take an easier route like the services above. But whatever works for you, try these options over sending attachments. Please don’t send me attachments!
One last service I am going to mention is Dropbox. Dropbox is a utility you install on your computers and it syncronizes files and folders across them. Macintosh, Windows or Linux! You organize files and folders on your computer they way you would any file or folder. When you drg and drop it to your Dropbox, it begins to copy to the Dropbox servers and then back down to the other computers you have setup for you Dropbox. It’s free up to 5GB. I use this to easily copy files between my wife’s Vista machine and my MacBook. Works from home and work without issue.
“Ok Michael, what does this have to do with your pet peeve about email attachments?” Well, I’m glad you asked! Dropbox has a public folder that you can share a URL to and send that link by email. Voila! Also, the developers of Dropbox have mentioned that they might add some features to make one-off file shares easier too.
The last thing I will say is that you definately need to be cautious about who you recieve attachments from and what the attachment is. But using one of the services I mentioned above does not remove the responsibility of being cautious. A link to a dangerous website can be as unsafe as opening a bad attachment. Be careful!
Michael Johnson Security attachments, Drop.io, DropBox, email, MediaFire, Security, YouSendIt
