Send email attachments up to 5GB with AOL's Xdrive

by Brad Linder Dec 25th 2007

While most web-based email services have file attachment size limits, there are plenty of ways around those limitations. MailBigFile, YouSendIt, Driveway, and other services all let you "park" large files temporarily online and send an email to your friend or colleague letting them know the file is available for download. But sometimes you want to send a message directly from your email client and still attach a large file.

This blog's parent company AOL is launching a new service that attempts to let you do just that. And we want to like it, we really do. But right now it just doesn't work as well as we'd hope yet.

Here's how it works. AOL has a whole slew of web services, including a web-based email client and a web-based storage service called Xdrive, which gives you 5GB of online storage for free. So combining the two was kind of a no brainer. All you have to do is sign up for XDrive and then click the "attach file" button when composing an email message, and check the "Upload to my Xdrive" to send large attachments via Xdrive. Any file that's larger than 16MB will automatically be sent via XDrive.

For some media types, this works great. Your recipient gets an email with clickable links that let them view pictures or watch/listen to multimedia files online. But for other file types, things are a bit trickier. While the recipient will see a link with the name of the file you uploaded, when they click the download button they will get a file with an arbitrary string of characters for a file name. That wouldn't be so bad if Xdrive didn't also strip the file type from the name. That means if you send a Word document, for example, the recipient will have to add ".doc" to the end of the file before their computer will know which program to use to open the file.

We're glad to see AOL taking steps to allow users to send large messages via email. The concept is brilliant because it lets you get around file size limits whether you're the sender or receiver. But the execution still needs some work.

Tags: aim-mail, aol-mail, file-attachments, xdrive

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Saad Raza Abbasi said 12:41PM on 12-25-2007

One service which is comparable to the ones listed here is www.eatlime.com. i have used this service and it is very cool and works well too ... they have this desktop client which enables you to share any folder of yours with anyone ... it integrates into the right click menu and generates a download link which u can send to your recipient ... it uploads the file in the background and ZAP!! u've just shared a big file ... :)

Sam said 11:32PM on 12-25-2007

I used YouSendIt and the other old-school services, but these days Sendshack is the best.

http://sendshack.com

Dakota said 7:36PM on 1-02-2008

Brad,

As much as I like reading http://www.downloadsquad.com you really f**ked up with this one.

Do your readers a favor and do some googling around about AOLs XDrive before you plug their "products".

Just a hint for you - AOL XDrive is like herpes.

Now I've never had herpes, but I have "had" an XDrive account.

A bit over two years ago I signed up because it looked like a great tool.

Execution was terrible and a little googling turned up a lot of people with similar issues and many more with far worse ones.

So I called and cancelled it before the trial period expired even getting the confirmation code, agent ID and all that jazz.

Several months later, still getting billed. Called back, complained, got the response, "No problem, we'll cancel this and issue a refund."

I go out of the country for a few months, come back and still getting billed.

Called back again, complained again (a bit more agressively), got a snotty response, "You must not have canceled properly." And a long attempt to resell me on it. Argued with them and after escalation got a "manager" to cancel it and issue a refund.

Bottom line - I had to call back a total of at least NINE TIMES and only finally getting my banks fraud and customer relations department involved and participation in several conference calls with the XDrive people.

Even after getting a cancelation with the help of my banks people, XDrive billed me for another month requiring another call to both my bank and XDrive.

I only got "any" money back because I both pestered my bank and told XDrive that I had discussed a class action suit with a lawyer. (And I had.)

You would be better off giving your bank account, social security and credit card numbers to Nigerian scam artist than to XDrive.

The name "XDrive" is kind of like "Agent Orange" - it seemed like a good thing at the time but now that you can't get rid of the problems it causes...

If you value your time, money and sanity... stay away from AOL and XDrive.

~D

tim said 9:41AM on 1-12-2008

i need to send a 5gb file

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

View more Time Wasters