Ever had hassles send files that turned out to be too big for your email, or the recipient’s email system to handle? Two new web services change that for good.

There’s lots of news on the Internet at the moment about a great new email attachment sending service called Pando. It works with web email services such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and others, and it also works with the email program on your own computer.

Pando is interesting because it lets you send files of up to 1Gb in size, making it easy and practical to send large video files, large powerpoint files or any large file that you want, overcoming the email attachment size limitations that many email services, whether web based or offered by your ISP, impose on users, often to their great frustration when they just want to send a file to someone.

Pando’s software is in beta, and it’s free to use. Instead of sending the actual attachment through the email, which would bump into those size restrictions, it send a small file that, when opened on the recipients’ end, either starts the file downloading from your computer, or from the servers that Pando has set up to which your file is temporarily uploaded for the purposes of being downloaded by the recipient.

Just as peer-to-peer technology has helped software such as Skype deliver good voice and video calls over the Internet, Pando likewise uses peer-to-peer technology to ensure the file gets to its recipient, using the distributed power of Pando users across the Internet to evenly spread the load of large files being sent around.

As we said before, the software is in beta mode, currently at version 1.2. While earlier versions only supported Outlook, this new version also works with Hotmail, Gmail, AOL Mail and Yahoo mail when used with Internet Explorer 6 and 7, as well as your existing Outlook email client on your PC. Outlook Express and other desktop email programs are not supported at this stage, and neither is Firefox.

The new 1.2 version only works with Windows PCs, but the previous 1.0 version also works with Macs, giving Mac users the same capabilities.

Pando’s competitor is a company called Yousendit. They offer a similar service started up in 2003 to deal with exactly the same problem, but their free service only works with files of up to 100Mb in size, although now that Pando is offering a 1Gb file size limit, Yousendit will need to respond or lose all of their users to the free Pando service.

Looks like the problem of sending large email attachments is finally solved for good!

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Entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 10:41 am under Storage, Technology, Tips and advice.

Read more entries by Alex Zaharov-Reutt.
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