Help with emailing large audio files

August 22, 2005 9:42 AM

I need to receive emails containing lengthy audio. One mail account simply does not show the attachment coming in. My .mac email account gives the sender this message: "This message is larger than the current system limit or the recipient's mailbox is full. Create a shorter message body or remove attachments and try sending it again." My mail box is definitely not full. Does anyone know of any way to email larger audio documents? Or a (free, preferably) email account without such limitations? The sender is a city government entitity, so getting them to compress, etc., is unlikely. Thanks.
posted by rabbus to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Email me if you want a gmail account.
posted by interrobang at 9:44 AM on August 22, 2005

yousendit.com

You're welcome. :-D
posted by shepd at 9:52 AM on August 22, 2005

Use YouSendIt, or Dropload, though Dropload requires a login.
posted by arco at 9:57 AM on August 22, 2005

Yousendit.com has been terribly spotty as of late with uploads. You'll often get a "Cannot Find Server" message in the middle of an upload, or something as equally frustrating. My friends and I use it often and it's been giving us a lot of grief.

But try it out first, because when it works it is quite fast and effective, but some other upload sites to try out are rapidshare.de (seems to be very consistent), megaupload.com (can be spotty as well, but is usually effective) and sharebigfile.com.
posted by apple scruff at 10:40 AM on August 22, 2005

Email me if you want a gmail account.

GMail only allows 10 MB attachments though. (Perhaps even less since it might be 10 MB encoded.)
posted by smackfu at 12:29 PM on August 22, 2005

I e-mail an 8 MB zip file (50 MB unzipped) back and forth with one of my clients. It is an Access database. The only e-mail that has been completely problem free has been AOL. It gets bounced by gmail, sprintpcs, and .mac. 0nly AOL has delivered flawlessly on this. I know, I should be shot because I still pay $14.95 per month. Don't hold it against me.
posted by jdstef at 1:20 PM on August 22, 2005

Burn it to a CD and mail it via the USPS. Yes, it'll cost you around a dollar, yes it seems very slow, but never underestimate the potential bandwidth of the Post Office.
posted by bshort at 2:16 PM on August 22, 2005

Email is not the way to send and receive large files. You need some kind of server, either a yousendit-type service or anywhere else you can have server space (if you have .Mac, that will work, I think). Find yourself an old Mac (but one that runs OSX, like the spiffy iMac DV I just found in the trash or which you can buy from eBay for $100) with ethernet if you have a high speed connection and run your own little ftp server (this assumes you deal with the same few people, so you can give them login privileges).

Or you could just use the public folder on your .mac account for the same purpose. I don't know how much storage you get (I'm sure you can pay for more) with .mac -- used to be pretty piddling but even so, enough for a large audio file or two at a time, and let your sender upload to that. Why add more complexity to the picture?
posted by realcountrymusic at 8:49 PM on August 22, 2005

ZIP or RAR the file into multiple, <10 meg. archives, then send a few gmails. Or set up an FTP server.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:09 PM on August 22, 2005

Gmail Drive maybe?
posted by kindall at 10:01 PM on August 22, 2005

This site will give you a free 1 terabyte email account and allow you to send and receive attachments up to 200mb in size.

Enjoy (but don't abuse: they WILL delete your account if you set it up without your real name/info). FYI, tho, I've never so much as heard from them after setting up my account, so it seems like a truly altruistic act on their parts.
posted by thewhynotgirl at 9:50 AM on August 23, 2005