So you want to send someone a large file? Perhaps your email account blocks large email attachments. Perhaps a friend told you to download a file, and your friend's website keeps timing out and aborting your download.

The solution may be YouSendIt. The folks at http://www.yousendit.com have a way to make these file transfers easy and secure.

1) Give YouSendIt a file, and specify who you want to receive it. The file can be up to 1GB in size.

2) Your computer will take some time to transfer the file to YouSendIt's servers.

3) After this is complete, your recipient gets an email with text similar to the following:

You've got a file called "vacation_pictures.zip" (12806 KB) from digitalbits@andybrain.com waiting for download. You can click on the following link to retrieve your file...

4) In seven days, the file will be automatically deleted.

Pretty good. Easy, secure big file transfers are a handy thing! The email account is used for pointing to the download link only, so email attachment size restrictions are not a problem. You can choose to use their standard site or their secure site. The secure site provides another level of protection - whatever you send to YouSendIt can't be intercepted by a third party during transit. However, when you give anyone else a file, you're trusting not only the company, but every person coming into contact with your information and your recipient's email account. Despite assurances, be safe and use encryption if your data is important.

YouSendIt makes money by displaying ads in the recipient's download windows, so this may not be an ideal solution for a corporate environment.