Journal: News & Comment

Big-ass documents

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A year and a half ago I wrote about why sending Word documents and big files by email is a bad idea. This morning, someone from made a comment on that post arguing for the use of their product to send large files by email.

Now, the fundamental concept of their product—seamlessly breaking large files into smaller ones sent in a series of emails which are then reassembled at the other end—isn't a bad one. It doesn't really address any of the points I made in my original post, but it would help people who need to send large attachments via email to work colleagues, for example.

Unfortunately, the program they're advertising requires both the sender and the recipient to be running their plugin, which only runs on Microsoft Outlook on Windows—which is, by far, the least secure email program in the world. Their website also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why Internet email is so useful: because it doesn't depend on particular computer platforms or applications to work. You can see my long screed of a reply, also in the comments.

Incidentally, I think the first comment is just a way to try to get traffic and Google PageRank to their site, but it's not pure spam, so I'm not going to delete it or anything. Their product might work really well, but I think its utility is limited to internal email communications within companies where everyone does run Windows and Outlook. Which, really, no sane company should be requiring these days.

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