Alpha Technical Solutions

Posts Tagged ‘attachments’

Email is a wonderful tool. However it does have its restrictions. One of which is you don’t know anything about the other persons system. In fact you don’t even know what other people on your system are doing. Normally this is not a problem. Email comes in and goes out and everything is nice and easy. Until that is you try sending a goodly sized collection of photograph, or videos or even some large PDF files. Pretty soon things can go bad, and depending on your system it can go bad for either you or the person you are sending the email to.

One way to stop this is not to send large files or collections of files by email as attachments.

So how to you do this?

The easiest way is to save your files somewhere on the Internet and to send the person an email with instructions of how to go and pick them up. That way the files can be downloaded nice and easily at their convenience.

There are quite a few services out there to do this. Here are 2 that I’ve used and found to be effective.

First up is Skydrive. Operated by Microsoft this gives a massive 25Gb of shareable storage. It’s not perfect though. In order to use it both parties must have Microsoft Live accounts and there is no tool to easily transfer files directly from your computer the Skydrive. However it is easy to use, the storage available is truly large and it works on company systems where you are not allowed to install extra utilities.

Next is Dropbox, this is a truly sweet system. A small download makes this part of your system. Files can be easily synchronised with  online folders which can be securely assigned to anyone with an email address. If you want to easily share files with anyone then Dropbox is a great solution.

So don’t send large files, arrange for it be picked up. Sooner or later someone will thank you for it.