What to Do When 10 MB Just Isn’t Enough.
If you’ve ever wrestled in frustration with ‘undeliverable’ emails, there’s a good chance you were sending an email with an attachment that exceeded the size limitations of your account.

Most corporate email accounts restrict attachments to a mere 10 MB. A few offer up to 20 MB. That’s enough for a small group of uncompressed photos, PDFs or graphic files, but not enough for most videos, bigger photos or larger files. Which leads frustrated users to file transfer companies.

Today’s growing file sizes have fueled the demand for file transfer companies, dozens of which have cropped up online recently. Competitively priced, secure, convenient and fairly simple to use, these services eliminate the need for traditional email attachments. Materials are uploaded to the site instead, and a link – as opposed to the actual file – is sent to recipients who can then access and download the files.
File transfer service companies offer users a variety of features and price points ranging from free for smaller file transfers, to $99 per month for larger file transfers up to 2GB. Prices are based primarily on the number of users and the variety of applications. Here is a criteria comparison chart of three of the more popular file transfer companies and services:

DEFINITION OF TERMS
Max File Size – The limit set by the service provider on the maximum size per file uploaded or received.
Max Download Per File – The number of times a file can be downloaded once the file is uploaded and link sent to a recipient.
Sign Up Required – All services require that the user signs up in order to use the service, although the recipient doesn’t need to sign up to download.
Users – The number of unique login names you can have. (These are essential in order to have an accurate audit trail.)
Send and Receive Capable –Services include sending and receiving files. Companies offer a drop box where your associates can upload files for you to retrieve.
Online Storage – Uploaded files can be stored on the server so that they can be resent without repeating the upload process.
Control Expiration – Once a file has been sent, the recipient has a limited number of days to download the file. The expiration period is controlled by the sender of the file.
Custom Page Setup – The ability to customize your login page with your brand and logo.
Secure Encryption – When transferred, files are encrypted for security reasons.
Audit Trail – History of who sent who which file and when. The same capability goes for files received.
Software – Various application types that allow you to use the service.
Max Send & Receives Per Month – This sets the limit of how many file transfers a user can perform a month.

This entry was filed under Useful Info