I ran across a blog that really irritated me:  Why It's a Bad Idea to Send Huge Files by Email

People who demand large message size limits rarely understand the limitations of the email transmission.

I hate to be snippy, but... DUH!  People that understand the limitations of email transmissions for online collaboration already have options.  People that demand large message sizes don't have any other option, or they would be using it.  Sure, I (personally) have a web server running on my home computer so that I can send pictures to my friends and family.  I don't know very many people (computer geeks included) that are willing to do the work (not that it's hard, but it's more work than email).

Because of the MIME encoding used when sending binary attachments, your files expand 33% when sent via email. In other words, a 15MB attachment requires 20MB plus the message text, plus message headers.

  So?  15 megabyte to 20 megabytes?  Really?  Why bother talking about 5MB.  Disk, CPU, and bandwidth are cheap and getting cheaper.  Please, stop talking about numbers in MB.  I stopped caring about MB years ago.  Now, if your 15MB file requires a gigabyte (1024 MB) in email form, I might care.  I might be slightly concerned about storing 5 copies on my 1 terabyte hard drive (that terabyte hard drive is 1024 GB, or approx. 1 Million MBs).  I'll accept that big companies might care, but I don't.  I (on my personal server) accept email up to 1GB in size.  And when somebody want to email me a 2GB file, I'll raise the limits.

Compare this to uploading the same attachment to a web server, FTP server, file transmission service like YouSendIt, or video streaming site like YouTube. One copy is uploaded. The download is typically 8-bit so minimal expansion factor. The small business' network can cache the content, so it's only downloaded once then fetched locally from the web caching server..

   While this statement is true, it's also irrelevant.  Most small businesses are not caching the content, so they end up downloading 5 copies of the video anyway.  Caching layers are expensive (if you even know they exist).  You have to buy the gear, get somebody to set it up, and figure out why it stopped working and "the internet is down".  Caching layers make a lot of sense if you're a big business.  Not so much for the small guys.

That said, I completely agree.  Sending files by email is a bad idea.  Any file.  Here are my thoughts:

• It usually starts a reply-all flood that quickly loses coherence.
• It's difficult to Index and Search well.  Sure, most mail clients will let you search, but it's still slow and not well indexed (this varies by email client).  Whenever I start searching my Inbox for something, I start googling it too.  I can usually google it faster than I can find it in my inbox.  
• My inbox is a landfill.  That's where knowledge goes to die, fossilizing in sedimentary layers of CCs that will someday be bulk deleted.  That's a bit harsh, but my point is that the email is not useful anymore.  When I train a new employee, I can't very well forward every email in my inbox.  There's no context for somebody else to knowledge mine it.  

Now, I'm obviously biased (I'm posting this on blogs.centraldesktop.com), but I have a better solution:  Central Desktop.  We are a web site, so uploaded files are 8-bit (no expansion factor), files are in a single location, and they can be cached (assuming the user has a caching layer).  We solve the original blogger's complaints, and mine.

Replies are attached to the file for anybody to read later.  It's well indexed; I can find information faster in Central Desktop that I can find it in my Inbox.  When I want to train a new employee, I add them to the projects they'll be working on.  Not only does Central Desktop have my entire knowledge base, it has all of my co-workers' knowledge too.  It makes bringing new people up to speed faster.  It makes bringing existing employees into a new project faster too.

To make it even easier, you can use email.  Every workspace has email addresses.  If somebody wants to email files to everybody, they just email one copy to a centraldesktop.com email address.  You get all the above benefits and the ease and familiarity of an email client.

There's only problem with my solution: People don't know about it.  If you're already a customer, check out our affiliate program.  If you're not a customer, signup for a free trial and start spreading the word.