send big files : Java Glossary

You may have discovered that email does not work well for sending large files, such as a CD (Compact Disk) image, or video to other people. Email is was designed in the days of the teletype, and hence uses a non-compressing scheme with almost 100% overhead. Vandals, or well meaning friends, can annoy you by sending very large files that tie up your email software for hours. Some email servers thus limit the size of an attachment. Some spam or security software blocks large attachments. So if you want to email someone a very large file, what can you do?

If you have a website, you can zip the file and upload it to your website, then send the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) by email to the recipient to download with a browser or FTP (File Transfer Protocol) downloader.

If you don’t have a website, you can use a service that does. You can send a file to many people. You have to upload it only once. If they don’t want it, they can ignore it, unlike email that ties up your Internet access whether you want it or not.

 YouSendIt

yousendit.com offers a typical service for sending big files. To solve this you need your own website that you can upload to with FTP and let others download from using their browser with HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). If you don’t have your own website, what can you do? You can use WinZip Courier. It uses the WinZip site as an intermediary. It costs  $5.00 USD a month so send files up to 2 gigabytes each. You can send files up to 100 MB free. You and the recipient each use WinZip’s web-based software to manage the delivery and pickup via the WinZip site. The other advantage is tracking. You can tell if the recipient has picked up the attachment. One other advantage is the recipient does not have to pick up the attachment if he does not want it. So it is much more polite to send a large attachment to someone this way.