CargoLifter review: Automatically send email attachments via the cloud
Email has come a long way in the past couple decades, but it’s still a hassle to send large files as attachments. Some email accounts have attachment-size limits, either for the sender or the recipient; many people check email on mobile devices, where large attachments can be both difficult to manage and expensive to download; and many people simply think that large attachments are bad email etiquette.
For all these reasons, cloud-based file-sending services have become quite popular. Instead of attaching a large file to an email message, you upload the file to cloud storage (a service that stores your data on a server that you connect to over the Internet). The service then provides you with a URL for downloading the file, and you include that URL in your message. The recipient receives an email unencumbered by an attachment, but with a link to download the file if and when they want.
iCloud’s attachment-size limit
The number of such services is surprisingly large and, it seems, growing daily, so obviously there’s a big demand for this functionality. And it’s an approach that works pretty well. However, it’s far from seamless, requiring several more steps than simply dragging a file into an email message—just getting your uploaded file’s public URL can be a hassle. And if you want to send multiple files, many services require that you either compress them into a single archive or perform the above procedure once for each file.
You can get around some of the hassle using any of a number of cloud-upload utilities. My current favorite is Swing for App.net, which displays a little “drop zone” icon in my menu bar. When I want to share a big file, I just drag it to the Swing icon; the file is uploaded to my App.net storage, and the download URL for that file is automatically added to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere. If I drag multiple files to the icon, Swing will even combine them in a single .zip archive for me, and then upload just that archive file.
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