Pro said:
Why do these things get stuck inthe first place? Over-sized? (What got stuck
for me was an 8 MB piece.). And does one get around the getting stuck?
No, what got stuck for you was the *actual* e-mail, not the original size of
the file that you attached. ALL e-mail - and I mean all of it - gets
transmitted as plain text. HTML is text with tags. RTF is text with a .dat
attachment to convey any formatting. Attachments get encoded into long text
strings (that must be decoded by the recipient). That encoding will bloat
the size of the e-mail by 137%, or more, of the original size of the file
that gets attached. Your 8MB file was 8MB * 1.37 = 10.96MB (or larger).
Next time look in the Size column in the Drafts folder. To create a draft
copy, hit Ctrl+S while composing an e-mail (or close the compose window).
That is the actual size of the message that you intend to send. If your
mailbox quota dictates a maximum size of 10MB for an e-mail then you
exceeded it when you attached that 8MB file that got encoded and bloated the
actual size of your e-mail beyond the 10MB limit.
To stay under the 10MB limit for your outbound e-mails, check the size of
the e-mails that you send do not exceed that limit. Also, why are your
e-mails so huge? Why are you trying to use e-mail to transfer huge files?
E-mail is NOT a reliable file transfer mechanism. It wasn't intended or
designed for that. It was designed to send lots of small messages. There
is no CRC check on the file to ensure integrity. There is no resume to
re-retrieve the file if the e-mail download fails. There is no guarantee
the e-mail will arrive uncorrupted. Large e-mails can generate timeouts and
retries due to the delay when anti-virus programs interrogate their content.
Stop using e-mail to send large files. It is rude to the recipient. Not
every recipient might want your large file. Not every recipient has
high-speed broadband Internet access. Many users still use slow dial-up
access, especially if all they do is e-mail. You waste your e-mail
provider's disk space and their bandwidth to send a huge e-mail. You waste
the e-mail provider's disk space and bandwidth at the recipient's end. You
eat up the disk quota for the recipient's mailbox (which could render it
unusable so further e-mails get rejected due to a full mailbox). You
irritate users still on dial-up that have to wait eons waiting to download
your huge e-mail. Some users have usage quotas (i.e., so many bytes/month)
and you waste it with a file that they may not want. Stop being rude. Take
the large file out of the e-mail.
Save the file in online storage and send the recipient a URL link to the
file. Your e-mail remains small. It is more likely to arrive. It is more
likely to be seen. The recipient can decide whether or not and when to
download your large file. Be polite.
Your ISP probably allows many gigabytes of online storage for personal web
pages. Upload your file there and provide a URL link to it. Other methods
(of using online storage), all free, are:
http://www.adrive.com/ (50GB max quota, 2GB max file size)
http://www.driveway.com/ (500MB max file size)
http://www.filefactory.com/ (300MB max file size)
http://www.megashares.com/ (10GB max file size)
http://www.rapidupload.com/ (300MB max file size)
http://www.sendspace.com/ (300MB max file size)
http://www.spread-it.com/ (500MB max file size)
http://www.transferbigfiles.com/ (1GB max file size)
http://zshare.net/ (500MB max file size)
http://www.zupload.com/ (500MB max file size)
If it is sensitive content and when storing it online in a public storage
area or to guard it against whomever operates the online storage service,
remember to encrypt it.
