THIS week I was inspired to write about a topic after a friend needed help in sending a 45MB file to someone in New Zealand.
The problem he found was that gmail restricted the attachment size to 25MB.
My initial comments were that sending a 45MB file through email would be a problem, and had he managed to send it, the person at the other end receiving it would be equally shocked having to download it on his/her email.
It is common these days to want to exchange large documents or send family photos to others over the internet.
However, it is not a good idea to send large files using email.
There are several options in exchanging large files to others on the internet including two popular methods — one being a cloud sharing service like Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) where you can share a folder and upload the file for others to download, and the other — to use a file sending service like YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com).
Dropbox is great for regular file sharing, but requires more time to setup than YouSendIt, which is perfect if you need to send a large file to someone infrequently.
It is also a good idea to compress a file before sending it so that the file size is reduced.
The smaller the file size the less bandwidth is required to send that file, hence the cheaper it is to send the file over the internet.
Two popular file compression programs are Winzip (www.winzip.com) and WinRAR (www.rarlab.com/download.htm).
* James Trusler is the director of Foneology