Thursday 17 May 2012

eMail management pain - attachments solutions

In my life as an IT and technology lover there is surely one problem that dogs me through my professional life. EMAIL! It's bad enough getting 3 billion of the little sods a day, but then you want to send or receive one that's over a megabyte or two -- oooohh no - way too big. In this age of terabyte hard drives in personal home computers and gigabtyes of storage on handheld devices, still a megabyte or two is enough to make some email systems implode violently. I had considered that there should be auto-zip functionality out there built into email programs, but recently "The Cloud" has begun to provide the solution. Instead of an attachment being replicated to numerous recipients and forwarded on to others etc. - until it exists in thousands of places; now "The Cloud" is where your attachments reside and people just link to them - downloading their own copy only if they want to. Microsoft Hotmail has the Sky Drive and I've just seen a YouTube clip of "Box" for Outlook. Surely there are more of these solutions on the way. I'm here to say - hoorah! If you haven't started using such a solution please do. We can only hope that someone somewhere hosts a few servers for the awful FW emails that replicate images millions of times around the world - instead we can all link to centrally held data (and then if the server gets lost.... well wouldn't that be a shame!)

See this link for Box: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdyFzNQXMfc&feature=related
See here for SkyDrive: https://skydrive.live.com/