YouSendIt

(Via TidBITS) Working in an academic library setting, I often work with students who, rather than wanting to print an online journal article for a fee on the library's networked printer, opt to email it to themselves. This works fine when the publisher offers a built-in emailing functionality. But not all do. Because the library workstations do not have a mailserver available, the only way students can do this is by downloading the article to the workstation's scratch space, opening a web-based email client, attaching the file and emailing it to themselves. However, students who don't use a web-based email or who are already maxing out their disk quota are out of luck.

YouSendIt seems to be a workable solution.

It's a free Web service that's about as simple as you could imagine. On the YouSendIt Web page, you fill in the recipient's email address, click the Browse button to locate the file you want to send, optionally enter your email address and a message, and click the Send It button. The recipient then receives an email message containing a link that downloads the file. If you don't want to reveal your recipient's address to YouSendIt, just send the link to yourself and forward it manually with whatever additional text you'd like to add.

Files can be up to 1 GB in size, and YouSendIt scans all files for viruses (not being a virus-infected Windows user, I don't know what happens if they discover a virus in something you send). Files remain available for 7 days and allow only a limited number of downloads to prevent abuse. The recipient can also click a link to delete the file after downloading. If you want secure transfers, you can switch to a version of the page that uses secure HTTP for both you and your recipient; of course, that assumes you trust YouSendIt in general. You can even put a link like the one below on your Web site that others can use to send you files via YouSendIt.

http://www.yousendit.com/ ? recipient= sample@ yousendit.com

Posted by Tom on February 01, 2005