I’m sure everyone has run into this situation: you need to email a file but it either won’t attach or it gets bounced back because it’s too large. Most email providers limit you to attachmentaround 20 megabytes for an email. It’s not just your email host you need to be concerned with either. The receiving server needs to support the size of your file as well or it will bounce back. Here’s a few things you can do to get that file where it needs to be.

Split it up.

If you’re emailing something like a group of photos, or several files, the easiest solution is to simply send fewer of them at a time over multiple emails. If you can do that, this is by far the easiest way around the problem.

ZIP it.

Windows has the ability to ZIP/compress a file built-in. This will take one or more files and combine them into a single file and run compression algorithms on it to make the file smaller. Depending on the type of file it could compress it anywhere from 10% to 90% smaller. To ZIP a file in Windows right-click on the file(s) and then select Send to, then select Compressed (zipped) folder. A new zipped folder with the same name is created in the same location. You can see if that made the file small enough to email.

Upload to a sharing site.

If the first two options don’t work, you can use a file sharing site. This involves uploading the file to the site, then emailing a link to the uploaded file to the recipient instead of attaching the file to the email. Here are a few sites you can try:
DropSend
MyAirBridge
Ge.tt
Most sharing sites are as easy as just a few clicks.
If you want a well known, reputable company for sending sensitive files, or sending files on a regular basis, you should consider signing up for an account with Citrix ShareFile

You can also use sites you may already be using like Dropbox or Google Drive to upload and share large files.

-Luke