A Better Way to Send Large E-Mail 'Attachments'

Want to share photos with friends and family? Or send a great video of your daughter's ice-skating performance to a dozen or so of your nearest and dearest? Fight the temptation! E-mail messages with large attachments can really gum up some people's systems. If a recipient has dial-up Internet access, the download can take hours, and block other e-mail for all of that time. In some cases the download will fail, and fail again, effectively breaking the recipient's ability to receive mail at all. Also, Internet e-mail clients add considerably to the size of the file being sent. For example, saving an Outlook Express message with an attachment adds up to 40 percent to the file's size. If you want to share files larger than 1MB, use a service like the free Dropload that allows your recipients to download the files from a Web server at their leisure.

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