For some time now, the cap on the size of email
attachments have been hugely outdated across email services. The more
tech-savvy among us have already moved to cloud-based file hosting
services such as Dropbox, Microsoft’s Skydrive and latest entrant Google
Drive.
But this week, Google Inc announced in a
blogpost that it was upping its game. A new feature, which is being
rolled out over this week, allows users to attach files up to 10 GB.
Compared to the measly 25 MB that was being offered early, making it
impossible to send anything but text files or resized pictures, the 10GB
offer is something that will open up new possibilities in sharing
content.
However, this new feature is available for
those who have signed up for Gmail’s new ‘email compose experience’
(that uses a floating screen giving email a messaging-like look and
feel), which was launched in October. This is still in its testing
stages and offered only to a section of email users.
In
essence, what you’re really sending is a link to a file hosted in
Google Drive, much like what you would do when you use any of the
cloud-based file sharing services. The only advantage here is that you
don’t have to sign up for or move out into another service; you can do
it from the comfort of your email inbox.
According
to Google’s blogpost, now with Drive, a user can insert files up to 10GB
that is 400 times larger than what you can send as a traditional
attachment, from Drive directly into an email. An added advantage is
that as the file you are sharing is stored in the cloud, recipients will
have access to any changes that you may make in the file even after you
have sent the file.
Given that the service is not
yet accessible for all, there’s a lot of excitement and impatience on
online forums to use this new service. But given bandwidth issues and
poor network speeds that continue to dog our experience, there is room
for a dash of scepticism. A small test attempt to attach a movie file
(around 4GB) to email on a fairly basic Internet network (which promises
the usual 100 MBPS speed) failed after 10 minutes.
Trilok
Nathan, a software engineer who tried to use the service from the home
network, says that while the move was indeed exciting, and opened up a
world of opportunity, without high-speed networks, “it's a bit of a
waste.”