Probably knowing what the person you're emailing to can receive is more important. For instance, I can't receive more than 10MBs at one time. But you may be able to send much higher, but only your ISP company can tell you your limit of what you can send. What somebody can receive, depends on their ISP.
EDIT: I sent one last night at 8.95MBs and it ballooned up to 12.1MBs, thru yahoo. The person receiving said it turned back into 8.95MBs.

Oh, about 45GB ... just to see what would happen. It worked. Only took about 25 minutes too, but it was between two mail servers on the same 100Mbps network.

Out through the open 'net i've successfully sent an .iso CD image at about 500MB. That took me a couple hours to get it sent, and the recipient needed about 9 hours to retrieve it. It would have been a whole lot easier to post it on my FTP server, but the person i was sending it to was too scared to try anything but email.

It would be better for the customer to download through a server you operate
yourself. FTP server software can be had for free on the internet.

You can see files on my server right now if you know my IP address.

We send DVCAM tapes FEDEX all the time overnight. Much easier than
down/up loading. Once edited the MPEG is usally under 50 meg and most
ZIP programs can password protect the file.

If you don't have a server, you could upload to one of the file sharing sites, megaupload and rapidshare come to mind. You might have to open a paid account to put up large file sizes. You can zip the file with a password that you email to the potential recipient.

I've had files of as little as 5 MB get dropped - not bounced. One thing to do is send them a seperate email saying what you're about to send them and how big it is. That way they'll know if they aren't receiving something.

The other reason to tell them before sending it is so they won't think their mail client crashed when it sits there churning.

Yet another option is to put the file on your own ftp server (I think Userv is free) and then send them email with a link in it like ftp://username@my.ftp.address

And just tell them what the password is.

Rob Mack

Thanks, guys. This was not for me, but for a client. They have a video they want to attach to e-mails and send to their clients.

Using Sorenson Squeze I got the 7-minute video down to a file (.wmv) size of about 10MB (looks and sounds very good, too). I was able to e-mail it to my client as an attachment without any hitches.

Thanks again for your input!

I use pando (www.pando.com) to send large files to people. It's free for files up to 1 GB. Versions for both Mac and Windows.

Tubes (www.tubesnow.com) also looks interesting but haven't tried it yet.

Steve

Personally, I'm not in favor of e-mailing files larger than 1 or 2 meg. Instead, please upload the file to your website and e-mail a link to that file so they can download it without being forced to do so and WHEN they want to.

Good point, especially if you're sending large files and the recipient is not expecting it / likely to get it when they have other things to do etc.

Bob.

Never heard of Pando before, that looks interesting, I will give it a try.

I have been using yousendit.com. Free for single files up to 100MB. No software to DL or install.

Jeff