ANTenna Blog -- Apple

I e-mail a lot of files to people – big files. Really big files. Recently, I sent an 80MB video to one person, and a whole bunch of 10MB PDF documents to someone else. A colleague sent me an entire directory of digital photos via e-mail. Yes, via e-mail. I’m going to tell you how.

Am I nuts? Of course not. Yes, I know that e-mail is slow and unreliable for large files, and half the time they bounce back because mailboxes have send or receive limits, or an e-mail relay hiccuped.

What’s the alternative? You can use ftp, but that’s only good if there’s an ftp server that both the sender and recipient can use, and if both parties know how to use ftp software. You can FedEx a CD-ROM or DVD, but that’s expensive and often unsatisfying when we’re all running on Internet time.

The weapon of choice for me is YouSendIt, a Web-based service that works like this:

• You log into YouSendIt.com, and tell it you want to send a message. You can send files up to 100MB with a free account, or up to 2GB if you get their $9.99/month plan.

• Provide the e-mail address of the recipient(s). YouSendIt will prompt you to identify the file on your hard drive, and start the upload. This can take a long time for a big file, using HTTP transfer.

• Once the file has been uploaded to YouSendIt, the service sends a regular e-mail – no attachments – to the recipients, providing a unique URL that they can click. When they click it, their browser will begin downloading the file.

This service neatly bypasses all the size restrictions that you have on sending and receiving e-mails. In over a year of using it, YouSendIt has proven itself to be extremely reliable; it’s completely eliminated my need to use ftp servers to send large files to other people.

Why am I writing about this service now? Because the company has released a small Mac application, YouSendIt Express, that you can download and install onto your Mac. To send a file to someone, launch YouSendIt Express, fill in the e-mail recipients, and then drag-and-drop the file(s) that you want to transmit right onto the application.

When you press the SendIt button, the application transmits the file(s) to the YouSendIt server using a more efficient protocol than HTTP – so the upload is faster. What’s more, the upload doesn’t suffer any of the nuisances of the Web browser upload. For example, it can upload files in the background, even if your browser is closed, and if an upload is interrupted, it’ll restart from where it left off. You can even set up the transfers when you’re offline, and when your Mac is back on the network, the transmissions will start up automatically.

With YouSendIt Express, a great file-transfer service has become even better. I strongly recommend that you sign up for a free YouSendIt account, and use the YouSendIt Express application. It’s the best thing since S/MIME.

(Oh, yes, they have a Windows version of YouSendIt Express too.)