As we help clients clean up their email due to space limitations, or performance issues, we have seen some questionable email tactics. Some people use their email as a file repository, some try and send ridiculously large files and some just save every single piece of email they receive. Including spam. One of the quickest ways to run out of space on your email account is to send and receive large files. While the file size you can send has increased over the years, it doesn’t mean you SHOULD be sending these files via email. It’s inefficient and it can cause major problems with your email server.
Mozilla wants to help with this email problem and has launched a new website that makes it really easy to send a file from one person to another. The site is called Send, and it works similarly to Snapchat for file sharing: after a file has been downloaded once, it disappears for good.
The new service can support files up to 1GB, and after uploading something, it’ll give you a link to send to someone else. That link will expire once they’ve downloaded it or once 24 hours have passed. So, make sure you let the person know that they will need to download the file right away. Files are also encrypted as they’re uploaded, and Mozilla says it “does not have the ability to access the content of your encrypted file.” This should put some privacy concerns to rest.
This is a much better way to transport files between two people. The problem with sending a file via email is that once you have downloaded the file and saved it to an appropriate location, the file still remains attached to the email. For extremely large files, that is a lot of space that can be taken up twice (once on the file server or computer, and once within the email server).