DropSend

Published 18 years, 10 months past

In my work with Happy Cog Studios, which is a strategic partner with Complex Spiral Consulting, we’ve had occasion to send each other really big files, like Photoshop design comps and so forth.  As just about everyone knows, this is hard to do via e-mail, since SMTP servers usually cap attachment sizes at 10MB.  Even if a file size is below that limit, it’s kind of a pain to send large attachments.  Your e-mail client sits there slowly uploading the attachment, and then on the other end, someone else’s e-mail client gets to sit there slowly downloading it.

This is why we started uploading our files to our personal web sites via FTP, and sending around the URLs in email.  That’s great for macho geeks like us, even if it is a bit tedious, but not so great for most people.

You know what would be great for most people?  DropSend.  You can upload files via your browser, or grab a desktop application (for both Mac OS X and Windows!) to handle that part.  Then you just send a link to the file to people who need it, and you’re done.  There’s a basic free account which ought to satisfy any occasional user, and some fairly cheap paid account levels to add more storage and sending capabilities.  If you’re in search of a better way to send really large files, it’s worth a look.

Nice site design, too.

Disclaimer: the creator of DropSend, Ryan Carson, is also the founder of Carson Workshops, for whom I’ve done a couple of seminars.  For that matter, he’s a co-founder of BD4D.

Comments (8)

  1. You might want to check Yousendit.com as well. It’s a free service, and files up to 1GB are excepted. Dropsend’s upload tool might be decisive though.

  2. How do they ensure confidentiality of files? It looks like they just obfuscate them via random hex. It seems a bit iffy to just leave them wide open on a web server.

    Personally, I think prefer using chat or Subversion to share large files. Chat isn’t secure, but at least an attacker has to go to the trouble to intercept the whole transmission instead of just one line in an email.

  3. The site Free File Storage reviews nearly all file hosting services available on the net.

  4. The soon-to-be-released AllPeers claims to make this sort of thing easy, in Firefox at least. And it is peer-to-peer so you don’t need to publicly host what might be private data on some 3rd party server.

  5. Pando may be worth looking at too.

  6. See also
    http://www.dropload.com/ (my fav)
    http://www.sendthisfile.com/
    http://www.yousendit.com/

    These are great for clients who don’t want to have to learn ftp to send you large files, and they can really save your mailbox.

  7. I start using dropsend free services 3 mounts ago. I think this type of sevices have a bright future. I give you an exemple: if i want to send large professional images for printing is very dificult using a simple email acount…the solution is something like drop send… a good idea is the desktop uploader tool.

  8. I would also give Dliveo a try as well. It’s more of a direct person to person sending model kind of like e-mail but with no attachment size limits. No storage to manage, and it’s also currently FREE.

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