Another option for sending large files

The links in this post should redirect, but please note that YouSendIt.com is now HighTail.com

Today’s post isn’t going to be very long, but I want to tell you about an option for when you need to send a large file to someone, and it is only going to be a one-time occurrence or maybe only once in a while. In my previous post, I told you all about Dropbox, but what I’m going to tell you about today does not require the other person to use the same program.

When I was editor of my university newspaper, I learned about yousendit.com. The files that I needed to send to our printing company were too large for our school email—sometimes as large as 20MB. Yousendit is great for just this scenario.

Sign up at yousendit.com

All you have to do is go to their website and sign up. This is just a matter of providing your email address, name, and creating a password. The next time you have a really large file—up to 50MB is free—that you need to send, you just go to yousendit.com and enter your email address, the other party’s email address, and upload the file. That’s all there is to it.

yousendit.com logo

I do suggest advising the other party that the email will show it coming from yousendit.com so that they can check their spam folder if need be. But other than that, they don’t need to do anything else but watch for the file to arrive. The email will come to their email inbox and they will click on the link provided, which will take them directly to their file in yousendit.com and they can download to their computer. Again, they do not have to sign up for anything.

Some email carriers now have larger email limits than were available in the past, so you may not find you have a need for this. But for people who send video files, for example, they could probably use an option like this.

I see that yousendit now offers some of the same features that Dropbox offers for file storage, and I can’t speak to how well that works since I’ve never used yousendit for anything other than sending large files. If you’d like me to run a comparison test on this, let me know.

Question: What’s the largest single file you’ve ever needed/wanted to send to someone?