A Detached Point of View

(See UPDATE note at bottom.)

So, KK sends me an email saying, in part,

A friend of Dan's sent out the judge's opinion re The Dover School Board - he attached 135 PDF pages!

Like KK, I still cling to my dial-up account. Hey, it was good enough for the last millennium, right? Remember when there were two different kinds of 56K modems?

But anyway, as long as at least two people still don't have mad bandwidth, I propose the following.

You know how there's an option in (most) email programs to choose whether or not to send a particular addressee plain text or HTML? There should be a similar option: whether the addressee prefers to receive honking downloads or not. When one attempts to send an email with attachments of, say, greater than 1 MB, a confirmation box would pop up and say, "This addressee prefers not to get honkingly large emails. Are you sure you wouldn't really rather just send a link, or use something like YouSendIt.com?"

I came across YouSendIt.com a while back, and thinking about KK's email, and that last paragraph, moved me to give it a test drive. Here's the report.

The idea here is that, instead of attaching, you upload your honkingly massive file to YouSendIt and then they send out an email to whomever you would have otherwise sent this behemoth as an attachment. The email that your friends get contains a link to where they can download the "attachment" at their leisure.

First impression: It works and it works nicely. This is a great idea. The interface is painless and intuitive, and no membership or sign-in is required. The file will stick around on their servers for seven days or a "limited number of downloads," they say. (Presumably, "limited" here means something more than 10). You can upload a file up to 1 GB in size. Also, YouSendIt says they scan for viruses on all uploads, and they claim to encrypt all transmissions. (I couldn't verify this -- I never saw an "https" or a lock icon, but, hey, you're probably not encrypting your email these days anyway.)

Best of all, it's free!

Well, that last line gives away part of the problem.

Since you don't have to pay anything to use their service, your recipients will get an email notifying them about the file that you uploaded, but the message is surrounded by border ads. The plain text message gets a little lost amidst the color ads. There's a chance that your friends will open it, glance at it, and trash it.

The second problem also has to do with spam-like presentation.

When you go to YouSendIt's site, you have the option of putting in your email address or not. If you do, then the "From" field gets filled with whatever you put in. In this case, there's a decent chance that your friend might look at the mail, if your email address is recognizable. (You'll also get a confirmation email from YouSendIt, giving you the link where your uploaded file lives.)

The subject line looks a little like spam, though. It says "YouSendIt Delivery Notification: [filename]." Since your file probably has an engaging name like pic2.jpg or A17x-3vw.pdf, that's not going to to help.

The problem gets worse if you don't put in your email address.

In this case, the "From" field gets filled with something like "YouSendIt Notification," and of course, the subject line is as before. To give an idea about how bad this is, the spam filter on my Yahoo! account tossed this puppy right into the spam folder.

Now, I guess that the best way to do it would be to upload your file, copy the link from the "upload complete" page, and then send email to your friends that your cute cat pix, weighty judicial decisions, what have you, are now available at this link. And this seems not at all unreasonable.

Ummm . . .

You're right. I've talked myself out of it, too. Good idea, bad end product. Break down and get a high-speed modem.

And then your friends can attach 100 GB video files when they send you email, and we'll be back here tomorrow.

---

[UPDATE 2009-08-27] NB: Changed all mentions of "YouSentIt" to "YouSendIt." Not sure if it was a typo (since I had the latter in a couple of places originally, too) or if there was another service with a similar name. In any case, YouSendIt looks like it does what I described above.