Dear Dave – Sending a File Failure from Aggravated in Arlington

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Its YOUR opportunity to ask a question, any tech related question and we will do our level best to give you our best advice.  If you want to submit a question, just send me an email to david@techhelpboston.com and add “Dear Dave” to the subject line.

On to our question …

Dear Dave,

I am trying to send a video to a friend as an email attachment and the email gets stuck in my Outbox and is never sent. Help!

 Best,

Aggravated in Arlington

Dear Aggravated,

Email was never designed with large attachments in mind. In the early days of email, 10 MB (megabytes) was the maximum size for an attachment. More recently, that limit has increased. Gmail and Yahoo now support up to 25 MB, Microsoft up to 20 MB. Other email providers will vary, but it is safe to say that if you want to send an attachment greater than 20 MB or so, you will be thwarted if you try the direct approach.

Fortunately, with the advent of cloud storage (Google Drive, iCloud from Apple, One Drive from Microsoft, Dropbox and others) it is possible to upload your “attachment” to the cloud, set up the file for sharing, and then send an email to the people you want to share the file with including a link to the shared file in your email. The procedure varies depending on which cloud service you use. Our technicians will be happy to work with you to develop an optimal procedure based on the email client you use and the cloud services you have accounts with. And if you do not have access to a cloud service, we can easily get you set up with one.

If you want to avoid all that complication, you can use a web service such as wetransfer.com. Wetransfer provides a very easy to use interface for uploading the file(s) you wish to share and sending the share link to your recipients. The only caveat with this approach is that it is not recommended for sharing files that contain sensitive or confidential information. If you have large files (>20 MB) that fall into that category, it is much safer to share using a cloud service account that is under your control.

Happy file sharing!