I've been reading about Maildrop, but I've done two test, and loaded up a Gig of attachments, and waited for the sign to come up asking me if I want to use Maildrop, but it never comes. What am I doing wrong? thanks.

Try actually sending the e-mail (you do need to use Apple Mail for this feature). Once you hit "Send" you should get the Maildrop suggestion.

Do you need to be using iCloud for Mail Drop to work?

A few months ago I ran into an oversized attachment problem...my email kept bouncing from my server, and no Mail Drop option was ever presented to me. I do not use iCloud.

Hmmm... This is interesting.


I do not see any such setting in Mail 9.3 (3124).

Are you using a POP account? I'm using Mail 8.2, and my four IMAP accounts all have that option, but my Verizon.net account does not.

Yes, I'm using POP/Verizon.net. (I quoted the entire related text, and there's no mention of either POP or IMAP.)

I'm on IMAP, I with icloud, but even when I click send, the suggestion does not come up.

I suspect that's Apple surmising that surely everyone uses IMAP.

Have you checked to see if your pref is set correctly


as per my post #41545?

If you're correct, it's pretty damned obnoxious of them!

Granted that it's the direction in which they're going, but the presumption is and always will be out of line.

But can you think of any reason why Mail Drop works only in IMAP accounts (if this isn't a bug)?

Thanks, I found the preference and checked box to use mail drop, but it still does not work. The mail, just goes out and sits in the outbox for a long time until I delete it.

Admittedly I am using MacOS 12 which may yield different results but…

GIVEN:

• a 200 MB attacment (specifically a .dmg) file)
• Account A: a .mac/.me/.iCloud
• Account B: GMail
• Account C: Third party IMAP account with low limits
• MailDrop not available for POP accounts therefore untested
• 60 Mbps internet connection
• Late 2012 Mac mini running MacOS 12 w/16 GB RAM & 1 TB SSD.

RESULTS:

• There was no prompt to use MailDrop on the sending end
• From A to B completely normal
• From A to C attachment initially appeared as a download link and later converted to a downloaded file without further action on my part.
• From C to A Attachment arrived as a download link and eventually converted to the downloaded file as in the preceding item 3.
• The source file that had been attached to the email was locked on the sending system until the transmission to MailDrop was complete.
• The only indication MailDrop was in play was the slow download when account C was either the sender or reciever.
• In another test using a 900 MB attachment it took nearly 20 minutes to complete sending the message.
• I did not test sending large attachments from iOS devices but they were received as download links which is standard for the platform.

Thanks Joe, what is your verdict?

I did get a message next day saying "unable to send attachment using mail drop, try again later"

Listen, I read about it in "Yosemite the missing manual" by the prestigious write David Pogue. He raved about Mail Drop, but it seems to be a phantom that does not work.

I have to disagree with your thesis that MailDrop is a phantom that does not work. I had not consciously tried to force MailDrop before you bought this up, but after my experiments I am convinced that it does work but as logic would dictate, when emailing large files the actual point to point delivery time may be longer than a standard email with small attachments. That said, I have now activated MailDrop for all of my IMAP accounts and I will most definitely be intentionally relying on it for large file movements in the future. I have not read David Pogue's Yosemite: The Missing Manual but from your description I would whole heartedly concur with his enthusiasm for the tool.

Now that I know I can receive large email attachments on my iOS as well as MacOS devices and thanks to MailDrop I can send those large email attachments using MacOS, I have to find out if I can send large attachments using iOS devices. I can envision a number of uses for it.:

Thanks Joe. You are in Apple mail and you drag a 900mb file as an attachment, and then just click send, and what happens?

There is a long lag while the attachment is being sent as indicated by the progress bar at the bottom of Mail's "Mailbox" column and during that time the original file that was attached to the message is locked. Eventually you hear the sent mail swoosh (assuming you have it tuned on) the message is transferred to the [I]Sent{/I] mailbox and the original file is unlocked.

Joe, ok cool, I saw the sending churning at the bottom and assumed as there was no sign saying anything about maildrop or it did not work. But in fact you are correct. It does it's thing and then later the email comes into my inbox, with a horridly long link --- 15 rows and 100 characters, saying you have a month to download.

Question:
1) Does this work with anyone on the receiving end, non mac users?
2) This is basically like sharing with dropbox, but with convenience of using Mail?
3) Anyway to get a more elegant presentation link?
4) I don't see the shoosh preference for sent folder, just receiving.

I don't have a PC to test with but a download link is a download link and it should work.
and it is free, requires no third party app, and does not consume space on the iCloud account
That is deeply embedded in the Mail code and maybe even lower down in the OS than that — so no.
I am getting the swoosh sound in Sierra, but at the moment I cannot find where to turn it on or off. I did find a lot of complaints on the web of its being lost in El Capitan however.

In Mail>Preferences>General there is a setting for incoming mail sounds AND below that there is a check box to enable sounds for other Mail actions. That may include the outgoing mail "swoosh".

Thanks Guys, on that note, the limit is 5GB I think, which is 1 more than Dropbox.

I had a situation recently that need to send 6GB, and a colleague let me use her pro Dropbox. Is there an over free 4GB service that you recommend?

I'm still wondering why Mail Drop works with IMAP but not POP. Is it a function of necessity or tough on you if you haven't got multiple devices?

Can one of my POP accounts be reinstalled as an IMAP account if I delete it, or does it have something to do with my email provider?

Thanks.

My best guess is there is no way to provision MailDrop in the relatively ancient POP protocols.

Thanks. That sounds unreasonable, but since I know close to nothing about either POP or IMAP, my opinion is probably unreasonable.

But what about my second question about converting a POP account to IMAP?

Edit: Never mind...Google to the rescue.

Not long ago I would have answered "nothing happens. that won't work". But I suppose email servers are getting beefier. That still seems like quite a stretch for most of them though. That's what cloud storage (dropbox et al) is for?

Unfortunately, POP has no way of sending a "heads up" to the server to advise them that they are about to send a multi-meg size file (which gets 30% larger when you encode it for emailing btw) and the mailserver has no standard headers in the hello to advise the client of its limits. So when you try to send a 50mb attachment, it just plows away at it, until it hits the mailserver's limit, say 10mb, so about 7mb of actual file, and then aborts the connection saying "too big" and your send fails. (after possibly a long wait to get to the 7mb point)

And finally, if you manage to stuff a large file into the pipe, and the mailserver on the other end doesn't choke right off the bat, you will probably slam the recipient's inbox quota and they will stop receiving email, until they can get that email downloaded and deleted.

Several times we had a customer come in with "broken email", that turned out to be a huge file next in queue in their inbox online. They'd be on dialup of course, and it would spend sometimes hours trying to download some email that had like 50 high res pictures of their son's trip to europe in it. Keep getting disconnected by chance or timeout. So we would download them at our store and get them wiped off the server, and advise them to tell their kids not to do that again. Either resize them or put them on a CD. (predates dropbox and large flash drives) There were a few times we had to go to webmail and delete it from there because we couldn't even get it from the store. A couple times we had to actually call the ISP and have them flush the user's inbox because webmail either wasn't working due to the file size issue, or they didn't offer webmail.

Yep. Major problems with that sort of thing on dialup, with transmission speeds on the order of 4-5 kbps. I find that I have to repeatedly advise e-correspondents to 'downsize' their wallpaper-sized JPEGs to under 100KB.
Otherwise I just tell them (for example): "Sorry. The mammoth JPEG would take 6 days to download and I doubt if a picture of you writhing on the ground with fugu poisoning is worth the time and expense. My condolences."

Thanks for that! I guess I now understand why I was unable to send a screen video a while back regardless of the fact that it appeared to be appropriately sized.

Edit: I cut it down to less than the size my ISP said was acceptable, but that heretofore unknown 30% overhead factor apparently stymied me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64

This is because email is meant to send text, not raw data, and does not support ascii lower than 32 or higher than 127, whereas raw consists of values 0 through 255. The encoding narrows the variation by expanding the size.