Can you suggest a better way to transfer large files to someone?

Glad that you asked. In fact, most end users are not aware of the fact that using attachments is a misuse and abuse of the Internet Email system, which was never designed for transferring large amounts of data. Therefore sending large email attachment(s) is actually a violation the original design of the email communication mechanism.

The email attachment mechanism was proposed back in 1993, before the Web became popular, but unfortunately was never really thought through. Nowadays, almost every one knows how to use a browser to review files of different formats, so using email attachments is really an obsolete way of doing things.

It's also of interest to note that despite the widespread (and inappropriate) usage of attachments, the proposed standard itself is not yet approved as a standard, more than 8 years after its publication!

It also has a dark side - it's the most common way for viruses and worms to infect PCs and to propagate.

OK, then what should you do? It's actually much easier than you may think. Outlined below is THE BEST WAY TO MAKE A LARGE FILE AVAILABLE TO SOMEONE:

1. Upload the large file that was originally intended to be an email attachment to a Web site using any FTP software, e.g. the freely available and excellent WS_FTP LE by IpSwitch, Inc.. The application is really easy to set up and use.
2. Send a short email, with the Web address of the uploaded file embedded in the message, e.g. http://www.example.com/pub/invoice.doc.

That's it. Now when your recipient(s) get the email, one click on the Web address is all that's needed. Simple, eh? This approach has the following distinct advantages of being:

• reliable. The full name of FTP is File Transfer Protocol. It's the mechanism designed to transfer large amounts of data. You also never need to worry about any email size restrictions that might have been imposed by your recipients' ISPs;
• quick. Sending a short email message is fast to deliver and to retrieve;
• safe. You never need to worry about viruses and/or worms, since the dangerous and obsolete email attachment mechansim is bypassed completely;
• efficient. You avoid the broadcasting of large amounts of data to many people and the majority of them may not need your large file(s). Those few who do just need to click on a link.
• secure. You can even use encryption software to encrypt a file first before uploading it, thus making its content completely unaccessible to anyone other than your intended recipient(s).

Some of you may wonder what to do if you don't have a web site. In that case, since most problems are caused by sending large attachments, so as a get around, you may wish to break up a large message when sending. You can also compress a file using a file compression utility such as the immensely popular WinZip before attaching the file as an attachment for sending.

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