Pesky email attachment limits!

Chinese New Year is a time of meeting up with relatives, often times ending up snapping photos of 'year-lost' relatives. Inevitably with the time and age that we live in, it has also become a time of exchanging of photos taken with each individuals' cameras when we say goodbye for the year. What happens then if you need to share those photos or even a hefty video?

Let's not have any of those crappy compressed photos sent over Whatsapp or any other messaging client. If you wish to send several large files over to your relatives or friends, you'll then have to send multiple emails to them because of limitations in email attachment sizes. What happens when you only wish to send one email with all your attachments? Here's what you'll be facing.

Of the three popular email providers, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, you'll be looking at

Provider	Attachment Size Limit	Workaround	Storage Size
Outlook.com	25MB	OneDrive.com	15GB
Yahoo Mail	25MB	Dropbox.com	2GB
Gmail	25MB	Google Drive	15GB

There are actually 3 email providers (I'm sure there's more) that allow attachment limits over 25MB. If you're interested, they are GMX, Lycos Mail and Inbox.com - their attachment limit is 50MB. Of the 3, GMX provides unlimited storage, Lycos offers 3GB free and Inbox.com is a 5GB offering.

The problem is unless your recepient is using one of those 3 email providers, they won't be able to receive your 50MB attachment. Which brings us back to the top 3 free email providers. Their workaround over the 25MB attachment limit is to use cloud storage. Outlook and Gmail have their respective cloud storage services, OneDrive and Google Drive, while Yahoo Mail has partnered with Dropbox.

There is always the option to purchase more storage space if needed but I'm going to focus on the free options. It should also be noted that the various cloud storage providers offer a variety of options to 'earn' free space.

Dropbox does so via a referral system, 500MB for each friend you successfully refer (yes they have to sign up!) up to a limit of 32 successful referrals. Linking your Facebook and Twitter accounts will net you 250MB extra storage. Using Dropbox's Mailbox service will earn you another 1GB increase. Complete the tour of Dropbox's features to earn 250MB, enabling the camera upload function will grow your storage space by 3GB. I remember purchasing my Samsung tablet/smartphone and getting a 50GB increase (alas! there is an expiry date on that increase). Alternatively, purchase 1TB of storage space for SGD$9.99/mth. 
Total free space: 22.5GB

OneDrive offers 15GB out of the box with the option of gaining 500MB for each successful referral of a friend - up to a limit of 10 friends. Similarly, if you link it to your phone's camera roll, you'll gain 3GB of space. If you subscribe to Microsoft's Office 365, you'll get 1TB of storage.
See sidenote at the bottom. 
Total free space: 23GB (223GB)

Google Drive is a 15GB offering and is closely tied in to all that Google has to offer. That 15GB is shared across your Gmail, Google Calendar, Youtube and Google+ accounts, so it does go pretty quickly. There is however no referral system but I've been lucky enough to get 10GB free from downloading Quick Office (apparently that offer is over) or if you purchase a Chromebook, you'll get 100GB free for 2 years. That said, if you're smart about it, Google Drive's 15GB could last a long way because, photos below 2048x2048 resolution and videos below 15 minutes in duration don't count towards your limit. Google documents that others have shared with you similary do not count towards your storage limit. 
Total free space: 15GB

Coming back to the task in mind of sending a huge file attachment to your friend or relative.

Start up any of the email providers, type in your email message as you normally would, attach all the photos that you wish to send and each email provider will popup a pretty similar message.

Gmail

Outlook.com

Yahoo Mail

Proceed as suggested by clicking 'Send using Google Drive', 'Go to OneDrive.com' and 'OK' and your photos will be upload to each cloud storage. Your friend/relative will then receive an email with your attachments - either as a link to the photos that you've shared in your cloud storage or a link whereby upon clicking, they will download the photos from your cloud storage. Voila! It's that simple.

An interesting sidenote, OneDrive has two current offers going on at the moment that could gain you quite a bit of cloud storage space. Not sure how long they'd last though.

1)  If you're a Dropbox user and you install OneDrive, and allow OneDrive to verify by sending a document to your Dropbox account, you will gain 100GB for a year. Find the link here.

2) If you signup for Bing Rewards, you will gain 100 GB for 2 years. Sadly this is only open to US citizens but use a free VPN and workaround that if you are keen. Link here.