Only a few years ago sending a 10 or 20 MB attachment file was quite a luxury, reserved to a chosen few. Unfortunately - for e-mail services providers - these times have passed irretrievably and users' requirements have changed - but not the e-mail services providers. They definitely can't match their users' expectations, as the attachments maximum size hasn't changed since. You can easily pass that limit with just a few high-resolution photos. Fortunately, there are some ways of dealing with that problem.

The major e-mail services are trying to stand up to the challenge, but if you are using "traditional" services you may have a limited size of attachments, such as 10, 20 or even 100 MB. Now imagine you want to send to your family some photos from a holiday, taken in high resolution. Just one photo may weigh a couple of MB, so with the 10 MB limit it's a highway to hell. There is also a problem if you want to send your e-mails onto other e-mail servers.

Since recently GMail allowed its users to send a total of 25 MB worth of attachments in an e-mail. It wasn't a problem if you wanted to send your e-mail to a recipient who also used GMail, but if you want to send it to other servers that have, for example, a 10 MB limit, there may be a big problem - the service provider may not let your message go. There are also problems even in case of just one service provider - a message may pass through many servers and one of them may cancel sending a message that is close to the limit. You should also remember that files you send are decoded on the servers, so a 9 MB file (on your hard drive) may take 12 MB on the server, thus be beyond the limit.

To sum it up, sending messages with large attachments is a rather tiresome task that often ends up in a total fail. How to deal with such files, then?

A cloud storage service - an alternative to attachments to mails?

If you want to send an e-mail with a large attachment it makes way more sense to use the cloud service. Nowadays this is the simplest and most efficient method for storing and sharing your files in the Internet. Interestingly, many e-mail service providers allow you to have no limits on the attachments to your e-mails that are connected to your cloud account. Recently Google allowed to share the files you have saved in a cloud via an e-mail. Now when choosing files as an attachment you can use the Google Drive service, so you can easily send even a few GB of files to another user.

Of course you can also choose the file sharing feature in other cloud services, such as Dropbox, SkyDrive, 4Sync, etc. All you have to do is to inform the receiver that you share a file with them via a specific service, and they only have to click on a hyperlink to download that file. Of course, it is much easier if the receiver has also an account in that service and we know about it - sharing files between two Dropbox or SkyDrive accounts is much more convenient. You obtain a link, later you upload the files onto your cloud drive and then you can access these files from any device anywhere.

If, however, you want to send an e-mail with an attachment that is off the limits, when trying to send the file the service provider (GMail, for example) will inform you that the attachment is to big and that you can send it via a cloud service. Instead of downloading the file directly from the servers, the receiver will obtain the file from your cloud account.

Sending a large files in an archive divided into parts

If, even though there are some up-to-date, convenient mehods you are still looking for a traditional way, or if the receiver doesn't have an account in any of aforementioned services you can divide a large attachment into a couple of parts and send each of them in a separate e-mail message. For example you can divide a 50 MB folder into five folders, 10 MB each, using an application such as WinRar.

However, keep in mind that the bigger the file, the more of the parts you will have to send and the process of sending may take up some time. Additionally, there's a risk that one of the parts "won't get through", or you will forget about one of them, etc. Additionally, the receiver has to have a program such as 7Zip or WinRAR on their computer to put all the files into one archive that can be later decompressed.

Sending a large attachment via a dedicated service

Sending your large attachment via a dedicated service is a kind of an alternative for two previous methods. Such services appeared out of nowhere to fulfill the needs of users who want to share their files but are limited by their e-mail providers. Not everyone has a Dropbox or SkyDrive account, and not everyone wants to send several parts of a file in multiple messages. Fortunately, anyone can access free services and download a file using a retrieved link.

The whole process is trivially simple, as all you have to do is to choose a service, pick up a file you want to send, copy the generated link and send it to your receiver using an e-mail account or an instant messenger. Remember, however, that such sevices offer both free and paid utilities and there are usually significant differences between these variants. In free variants there are several limits - the file size, upload and download speed are usually restricted, there are advertisements and you may have to wait some time before you can download a file. Of course there are no limits to the paid variants, but who wants to pay for sending just one file.

When it comes to such services Typhon Upload and Securely Send are worth mentioning – they are intuitive, convenient and user-friendly. If you want to send just one file looking for too long and testing many services makes no sense.

Conclusions - what method is the best?

It is difficult to choose just one best method for sharing your files with family and friends, as all three ways can be useful. It seems that from these three methods sharing your files in a cloud is the most convenient one, but the beginning users may get lost in all the features. On the other hand, sending archives in files is neither easy nor convenient, dividing, packing, sending, merging and unpacking files takes time. Using popular services to share large attachments is convenient, but you shouldn't use it to send important files - confidential e-mails shouldn't be shared via third-party services.