This situation might sound familiar: You write out an email and you actually remember to attach the file. You click send and then ...
Come on.
So how are we supposed to send over that important file in time for the meeting that’s starting in … 11 minutes?
Regardless of the email client we’re using, we’re bound to run into this problem every now and then.
Particularly because these are the max file limits depending on which app for email you use:
| Gmail: | 25Mb (per email sent or received) |
| Outlook.com and Hotmail: | 20Mb (per file attachment) or 300Gb (we’ll get to this) |
| Yahoo Mail: | 25Mb (per email) or unlimited (again we’ll get to this …) |
| AOL: | 25Mb (per email sent or received) |
| Mail.com: | 50Mb (per attachment) and 10Mb (per file) |
| Zoho Mail: | 12Mb (per email) and 10Mb (per file) |
| GoDaddy Workspace: | 30Mb (per email) and 20Mb (per file) |
| Bluehost Webmail: | 35Mb |
There’s a good reason for these limits. If there were no limits on the size of an attachment, everyone could send a 50GB file. That would drastically slow down servers and emails would take hours to send.
In other words, even though they’re annoying, these limits keep email efficient.
So how are we supposed to send large files, then?
These free tools are my personal favorites - some you may have heard of.
1. Google Drive
We can use Google Drive in place of Microsoft Word or Excel to create, edit, and store all our files on the cloud. Then, instead of attaching a file to our emails, we simply grab the URL of the Google Drive file and copy-paste it into the email.
Boom.
If you use Gmail, you can easily share files from Google Drive as either links or attachments while in your inbox.
Double boom.
Google Drive provides 15GB of space for free.
2. OneDrive
If you use Outlook, you might have seen that Microsoft has integrated OneDrive for your convenience. If you don’t use OneDrive yet, it would be a good option to consider if you use Outlook to send files back and forth often.
OneDrive provides 15GB of space for free.
3. Dropbox
If we’re only looking for a file hosting and sharing service but don’t plan on collaborating with others on editing files, then Dropbox is a great option.
With Gmail in Chrome, we can even install Dropbox for Gmail so that we can attach the DropBox file link directly from our email compose window.
DropBox provides 2GB of space for free.
Now we don’t have to worry about those annoying file size limits. We quickly edit a typo and send a huge presentation file to our colleague 11 minutes before a meeting … and know they’ll get it.
Bonus Tip:
Using Sidekick, our free email productivity tool, we can know exactly when our file is clicked. It takes two simple steps:
- Download Sidekick for free here.
- When inserting the Google Drive / OneDrive / Dropbox link in your email, hyperlink the text like so
Hey! Here's the link to the Monday meeting notes.
And that’s it! When your recipient clicks that hyperlink, you’ll be notified.
