Trying to send large video file...

Question

I am trying to send a quicktime video file via my mac mail. When I try to send I get error that says my server only allows files 29.6mb and smaller. How do I send larger files (the one I want to send is 58.6mb)

Answer 1

I did some digging, and if you aren't scared of Terminal.app, and the recipient on the other end is a Mac guy (or gal) and is not afraid of Terminal.app, there is a built-in unix utility that will do what you want.
To learn all about it, type man split 
As an example of how to use it, suppose you have a big file called "Movie.mov" that is in your Movies folder. cd ~/Movies to change directories to your Movies folder. Then type split -b 4m Movie.mov movseg 
This will purportedly take the file "Movie.mov" that is in your home directory's Movies folder, and split it into multiple files movsegaa, movsegab, movsegac, ...., not one file segment exceeding 4 MB (the "-b" option is segment size in bytes and can be a plain number or append a k for kilobytes or m for megabytes, the latter as in this example).
Now you can email each segment as an attachment in its own unique email message.
The recipient should download all the attachments to the same place (to make it easy) and cd to that directory. Then type
cat movsegaa movsegab movsegac {list of remaining movseg-- filenames separated by spaces} > Movie.mov and it rebuilds the original "Movie.mov" file.
I didn't try this with a movie file, but I did try it with a 140MB ".tgz" file and with a small text file. The MD5 checksum of the original and the reconstructed files were identical and I was able to uncompress and unarchive the .tgz file with no problem, and could open and read the reconstructed text file with no problem. You'd probably want to "trial" the reassembly yourself before emailing all of the file segment attachments, though.
The only problem -- if your recipient isn't a Mac user, I don't think Windoze command line supports these two commands.
Also, if your file is really really big and the automatically generated file segment name suffixes aa-zz (26 x 26 possible files segments) isn't enough to handle the total number of file segments that you'll need to fit through the email servers, include a " -a 3 " option either just before or just after the "-b {segSize}" option to make filename suffixes aaa-zzz (26 x 26 x 26 possible file segments -- your recipient will love you!) One could put together a unix script pretty quickly to rebuild a gazillion file segments into a reconstructed copy of the original, though.
PS - your .mac account may allow you to send a file attachment as large as 29.6MB, but many email providers only allow their customers to receive files up to 10MB in size, and some are even more draconian than that, imposing a 5MB limit (two local universities immediately come to mind). They will reject the attempted inbound delivery and you, the sender, may or may not get notification of that event from the recipient's server. So be sure to follow up with another email asking if the recipient received the "N" email attachments and did (s)he get the file reassembled okay.