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Sending Big Files

If you regularly work with clients, you’ll occasionally get files which even your professional email can’t cope with.  I’m particularly thinking of the client who sent 300MB in 15 mins and blocked our email server for the best part of an afternoon –  that was fun!

For many email providers, large files will simply get knocked back as undelivered.  You still need to get the file so what do you do?

There are a few different options:

  • Set up a secure FTP transfer file.  Not great for the non-techies though.
  • Break it into chunks. So if it’s 10 hi-res pictures, get them to send them on individual emails rather than one big one.
  • Use a shared workspace. Might require client log in and not all of these are secure – especially the free ones.
  • Use a service specifically designed for large files.

We’d recommend using a service – it has the added bonus of allowing you to use a widget on your website for clients to drag and drop files into.

There are a few different ones out there, your main concerns are speed and security:

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4 Comments

  1. Charlotte Burford on 6 October, 2010 at 6:48 pm

    I love this post, I had a client who liked to send lots of photo’s to be inserted into reports, however the files were so large they exceeded my file size limit (which was large anyway) and blocked my email server up for a weekend.

    Not only did I upgrade to an even larger file size limit, I then asked him to send the documents through http://www.sendthisfile.com I have a link on my website so it is very easy to use. This worked wonders and kept my email server space to a minimum.

    Since then I have also started using http://www.dropbox.com which is a great file sharing tool and am starting to use this more and more with my clients.

    I find Send This File is better for when sending large audio files or photographs and Dropbox for sharing of files as if like me you only have the free version you can exceed the limit fairly easily with large files.

  2. Michelle Atherton on 22 March, 2012 at 7:18 pm

    A good site to use for transferring large files for free is http://www.wetransfer.com – you get a receipt to say that the file has been sent, received and downloaded by the other party.

  3. Ron Liddle on 3 December, 2012 at 2:39 pm

    The biggest problem is when transfer gets interrupted and you have to start all over. Binfer is a great alternative for transferring big files. It can transfer big files of any size. The site is http://www.binfer.com

  4. Dayana Pears on 19 July, 2017 at 5:13 pm

    Nice and interesting! I actually use this: http://www.winzip.com/win/en/features/send-large-files.html to send large files via e-mail without a problem ,but your way is good too

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