I am a photographer and the images I send my clients

Sound like this is a business endeavor for you. You should have the common sense to pay for services that complement your business and make life easier FOR YOUR CLIENTS!

Email is absolutely the WRONG MEDIA to use for shipping large files. And it would make life MISERABLE on your clients!

Why? Because most hosted mailboxes (not things like GMail) are limited to 250MB in size, unless explicitly changed. 

Think … Microsoft Exchange Server, which is extremel common for lots of businesses. Even Linux servers running common email services often set up their default mailbox size to 250MB.

The fact is, you have no idea how much storage any client’s mailbox might have in it. Like voicemail, lots of people don’t bother deleting stuff until someone tells them they got an email bounced back saying their mailbox is full. Shoving a bunch of humonguous files at them is a surefire way to piss them off.

The whole world is moving to cloud storage. There’s a reason: you don’t have to be responsible for (managing) the hosting!

Maybe this article will help:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/whats-the-best-cloud-storage-for-you/

One more that I’d suggest if you want to host something at your home or office:

http://tonido.com

The only problem with hosting something like Tonido at home is that, while the time to upload a gig or two of data to the device is fairly fast FOR YOU over your local network, anybody OUTSIDE of your local network will have to suffer through whatever your ISP’s upload throttle is set to — 10-20 megs is “fast” for most plans these days, and will result in several hours per gig.

Your best bet, IMHO, is to use a cloud-based service like Dropbox that lets you send a link to individual files or folders to your client. They get the benefit of full-bandwidth downloads without the penalty of having their mailbox “mail-bombed” by your huge payloads that might not even fit.

BTW, Dropbox has a nice feature whereby if you send a link to a folder that contains images, they automatically set up an image browser for you!

Also, the MONTHLY cost for most of these services is LESS than the cost to send a DVD disk via overnight mail ONCE.

If you’re in this to make money, you should go with the cheapest, most effective option that makes your clients happy. 

Stuffing huge files into their mailbox might be cheap, but it’s sure not gonna make them happy! (And it will probalby fail more often than not, making them even more unhappy because of the hassle.)

Shipping DVDs via overnight mail might not be an issue for your clients, but it sure ain’t cheap. And it’s a hassle for you.

-David "The Tool Wiz" Schwartz

On Sep 12, 2016, at 6:37 PM, Michael <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

So the only way I'm going to get the file to them is to physically mail it to them? I don't want to be responsible for hosting them.

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 9:33 PM, Anon Anon <lokotejones@gmail.com> wrote:

Email is not the correct format for files that size. Host them on an external tool like a webserver or ftp server.

On Sep 12, 2016 6:32 PM, "Michael" <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

I wrote this email to my email provider and would like to implore the PLUG's brain-trust if they know of a way to do this incase my provider laughs at me.

Hi. I would like to discuss your limitation of only allowing an email to be 25MB. I am a photographer and the images I send my clients totals to around 127 MB. I've gotten around your limitation by sending the pictures in multiple emails. Unfortunately that is no longer going to work due to the fact that I am soon going to be producing videos for my clients. Videos , as you may well know, are  MUCH larger than photographs. The only way I see a way around the 25MB limitation is to host the videos on an external website (I'm thinking Google Drive) but I would really much rather give them what they are paying me for. As such I would like for you to increase the maximum allowed size for me. 

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