FileTalk - An Accellion Blog

Loved the tweet this morning from Shane Moorhead, self described as a shoe maker, clock cleaner, puppet master, and shearer of sheep.

” … 10MB Email attachments should go the way of the fax. Only for dinosaurs.”

Anyone who has recently spent any period of time with a child under the age of five will no doubt be up on the topic of dinosaurs. Amazing creatures, and hard to believe they once roamed the earth.  They came both big and small.  This got me thinking.

If large email attachments are heading the way of the dinosaurs, could files have a dinosaur equivalent, and what might that look like?

Is a 5MB email attachment equivalent to a Stegosaurus?  Would a 10MB attachment be a Tyrannosaurus?  20GB a Diplodocus?

I’m never quite going to be able to view email attachments the same way.  In future when I read complaints on twitter regarding email attachments I’m going to substitute the dinosaur equivalents…

“What kind of person sends an email with a Triceratops attached?  Three times.”

I could have some fun with this.

A few weeks ago I took my daughter to San Francisco to do a zip line through San Francisco’s Embarcadero Square.  It was quite thrilling to say the least! Not sure how this is related to Accellion, but it got me thinking about the problem I had at work the other day when I needed to send a number of files to a client. Having a developer background, my first instinct was to use Cygwin and zip the files beforehand and then try to sneak it through our mail server. But then I remembered that the very product I work with everyday already does that for me for free… AND …I don’t have to worry about  getting it around my mail server. Accellion Secure File Transfer allows you to choose a folder’s worth of data. The files are automatically zipped, sent securely through an SSL tunnel, then an email is delivered to the recipient with a link to download. When the recipient clicks on this link, the zip file is downloaded and automatically unzipped onto your desktop. No mess, no hassle, and I can sleep at night knowing my files are safe. Accellion makes file transfer as zippy as my ride across Embarcadero Square!

Mary Nicknish, Accellion Product Manager

Apparently our military is now fighting a Powerpoint insurgency, according to an article today in the NY times entitled “We have Met the Enemy and He is Powerpoint”.

Here I was thinking this would be an article about the perils of large Powerpoint files, and it was, sorta.  Except this article didn’t focus so much on the size of Powerpoint files but on the content. It seems that no military meeting, report or presentation is now considered complete without a Powerpoint slide deck, consuming numerous hours in the preparation. While several high profile military commanders are fighting back against the “death by Powerpoint” there is no end in sight.

General McChrystal the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan was shown a Powerpoint slide in Kabul last summer that is now bouncing around the Internet as an example of Powerpoint gone out of control.  This slide is truly frightening and as General McChrystal dryly remarked ““When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

Rampant “powerpointing” can be a real nuisance for IT departments.  I did a quick check on my computer and many of my powerpoint slide decks are greater than 5MB.  Sending around powerpoint slides to even a modest distribution list can really push the limits on email storage and performance.  With email attachments typically taking up more than 70% of email storage – Powerpoint slide decks are one of the major contributors.

Given the realization that Powerpoints are not going away any time soon –  what can be done to fight back? As a minimum, consider sending Powerpoint slides via Accellion file transfer instead of email attachments so that at least you make your IT department happy.  Also T.X. Hammes Essay entitled “Dumb Dumb Bullets” published in the Armed Forces Journal should be required reading for all military personnel.

Given that Tax Day is looming in the U.S. it seems only appropriate to draw attention to the tax that file attachments place on email performance and email storage. With files typically taking up more than 80% of email storage, file attachments place a heavy tax on email servers.

But organizations are fighting back.  They are reducing their tax rate by offloading email attachments using managed file transfer.

What’s your tax rate for email attachments? Take our short quiz to assess your email attachment tax rate:

1)  What size email attachments do you allow through your email system?

a) 5MB     b)10MB    c) unlimited

2) What size of mailbox do you allocate to each user?

a) 200MB  b) 2 GB  c) unlimited

3) What policies do you have in place for email retention?

a) 30 day    b) 90 day   c) no policies

Now calculate your tax-rate.

Each (a) answer is worth 5% tax

Each (b) answer is worth 10% tax

Each (c) answer is worth 25% tax

If you scored <15% tax – well done you are an excellent custodian of IT resources – however your security folks might want to check into how your business users are sending large files since it doesn’t look like email is an option.

If you scored >25% tax – it’s a good time to consider a managed file transfer solution.

If you scored >50% tax – you are either rolling in money or are seriously in need of a managed file transfer solution.

Contact Accellion if you are interested in reducing your email attachment tax rate. We’re here to help.