Okay, tonight I sent out a document to a few friends. 1.6 MB sent out to my email server. Whoosh. Some of my friends have very limited mailboxes from their ISP. Some only 30 MB, some as high as 50 MB. Very few are unlimited. I used to be worried about emailing out attachments because no-one likes waiting for attachments to download.
But the message I sent didn’t just go to my email server. The email was sent, but the attachment was sent to my file server. This meant the document didn’t actually leave my network. In it’s place, there was a URL to my file server. The 1.6 MB didn’t go anywhere near my mail server and it only left the file server when the recipients clicked on the URL. As the file server was on my LAN, the transfer was quick and seamless.
For me, my file server is public so the files were sent out of my network eventually. If you’re part of an internal team and would never send attachments externally, then this would mean you could more easily secure your files as they never leave the network!
Anyway. I’m now addicted to Rickshaw.
Rickshaw began life as an idea to help some of Mac-Sys’s customers who were in need of a method of sending large attachments. Sadly the local broadband and email providers put hard limits on the amount you can send in a single email. This made life very difficult for some. The original name of the app was going to be “UnfURL” which, as you can tell, is incredibly unwieldy and would only really reach out to geeks like me. And what the heck would the icon be like?
Yes, this is a solution built to resolve a problem. How to send email attachments without clogging up email servers.