Large File Transfer Blog

Video And Email Attachments: Forget It

If you've never tried to send a large video clip across the Internet via email attachment, let me save you the trouble -- don't bother.  Email wasn't designed to haul around large multimedia objects like video and that weakness still shows even at this late date.  The problems are:

The File Probably Won't Get There

Video files are big by nature, and with the proliferation of cameras on laptops more video clips than ever are being created.  Sharing these clips is key to business in a lot of cases, just like it is for PDFs, photos (JPEGs and GIFs) word processing and spreadsheet documents and all kinds of data types.  The problem is that video clips are larger (contain more data) by far than any of these kinds of files.  When you send a file using email, the sending program doesn't check with the receiving program if the attached file is too large to make it over, and with video, most of the time it is too large!   So what happens is the email is sent - and bounces back with "attachment too large".  But sometimes, much worse than that, the second big problem with video email happens:

The Attached Video Didn't Get There And You Don't Know It

The way email works means that a message with a big video file attachment probably won't get where you're sending it, which is bad enough.  What's worse is: you might not even know it didn't get there.  When email fails, you get a bounce message, but maybe not right away, and maybe not at all.  Plus, it's very common that the email makes it over but the attachment is prevented from coming over -- and you are never told!  That's no way to conduct business.

The Solution: Files Direct

Because Files Direct doesn't rely on email, any video attachment up to 2GB will make it to its destination!  Send along the file and an email confirmation to you and to the recipient appears immediately, taking the mystery and unreliability out of video file delivery across the Internet.