Stop emailing large files

The email bounced, or worse, it did not bounce and never arrived. Most mail systems stop accepting a message somewhere around twenty to twenty-five megabytes, and the limit that bites is the recipient's, which you cannot see. A deck with photographs, a scanned contract, a video of the walkthrough: all of them are over the line, and the line moves from company to company.

The fix is not a bigger mailbox. It is to stop sending the file and send a link to it instead. In Microsoft 365 that is OneDrive or SharePoint, which your company already has: right-click the file, share, choose who can open it and until when, and paste the link. One copy exists, so there is no version three of the proposal circulating in eleven inboxes. You can take the link back after the deal closes. It works from a phone. And the recipient does not need an account to open it if you say so.

Two rules for the link. Give it an expiry when the file is for one purpose, and share with named people rather than "anyone with the link" when the file matters. Both are a click, and both are the difference between sharing and leaking.

For anything that should not travel in the open at all, a contract, a patient record, a loan file, a tax return, use encrypted email. It is ours, it carries large files, it works from Outlook, and the person receiving it needs nothing but the email. What should not happen is the personal Dropbox, the free transfer site, or the text message with the PDF attached: the file leaves your company's control the moment it goes there, and nobody can say later who opened it.

If your people are still attaching, it is usually because nobody showed them the other way. That is a twenty-minute conversation, and we have it with every new client in the first month.