Thanks to Richard Hillsdon at Tekeez for this month’s Guest Blog
Usually, when you want to send a file to someone else, you email it as an attachment.
The problem is, email was never designed to send files, and each time you attach a file to an email the attachment grows in size up to 10x – so you end up sending a much larger file than you intended.
This causes many problems such as slowing both the sender’s and the recipient’s email account down and the email may be bounced back if it’s too large.
What’s more, every time you reply to an email and include the previous message string, the file gets sent again. So that 5Mb PDF you sent can end up taking up a whopping 500MB on your hard drive!
And if you use your mobile phone for email, but don’t regularly delete your emails you’ll soon find all those attachments have filled up your storage space.
Our favourite way to send files is to use Dropbox. You can sign up for a free account so there’s nothing to pay and the recipient doesn’t need a Dropbox account to download the file at the other end.
Sending a file this way means that you aren’t clogging up anyone’s email, you aren’t sending huge amounts of data and the recipient can chose when to download the file, so they won’t use up their data allowance if they’re on a mobile device. Another big advantage of this is that you can share the same file to multiple people but only need one copy on your machine.
Sending a file with Dropbox is very straightforward. Here’s how to do it:
Mac OS
1. Put the file you wish to share into Dropbox
The first step to sharing a file is to put the file you want to share into your Dropbox folder, in this example, I want to share the Photo 13… file
2. Share Dropbox Link
The next step is to right click on the file you wish to share, you’ll then see an option to Share Dropbox Link, click on this to copy the link to your clipboard.
3. Paste the link into your email
All you need to do now, is start a new email or a new chat in something like Skype, iMessage etc and paste in the link. The recipient will now be able to download that file when convenient. Sharing files this way stops you filling up your email account with attachments and is much faster than emailing files.
Windows 8.1
1. Put the file you wish to share into Dropbox
The first step to sharing a file is to put the file you want to share into your Dropbox folder, in this example, I want to share the Christmas 2010… file
2. Share Dropbox Link
The next step is to right click on the file you wish to share, you’ll then see an option to Share Dropbox Link, click on this to copy the link to your clipboard.
3. Paste the link into your email
All you need to do now, is start a new email or a new chat in something like Skype etc and paste in the link. The recipient will now be able to download that file when convenient. Sharing files this way stops you filling up your email account with attachments and is much faster than emailing files.
Our thanks to Richard. We’re using this method more and more as we try to break our attachment to… er… attachments.
