{"id":12,"date":"2011-02-21T15:35:47","date_gmt":"2011-02-21T22:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.gptnet.net\/?p=12"},"modified":"2011-02-21T16:06:32","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T23:06:32","slug":"sharing-large-files-with-the-convinience-of-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.gptnet.net\/?p=12","title":{"rendered":"Sharing large files with the convinience of email"},"content":{"rendered":"

In today’s world email became preferred way of communication in public and private sectors. With the progress and ever increased popularity of multimedia content on the network average email size increased. Many organization face the dilemma of keeping up to date their software and hardware to meet this ever changing requirements. I this article I would be focusing on mid- to large business organizations that have their own email private infrastructure. How to share large files with the convenience factor of email when your current email infrastructure can’t support it.<\/p>\n

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Facing reality<\/h2>\n

Classical problem that many organizations face: your users need to share large files with the clients and the only way is email. One option is to increase email size limits but it doesn’t mean that recipients email server will be accepting large files. For example, in my organization we have aging and now discontinued Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 Standard Edition. For those unfamiliar with this product: it has database storage limit of 16GB. We have approximately 175 mailboxes and thus keeping user’s mailbox as small as possible is one of the essentials. We implemented a 5mb limit for all incoming and outgoing emails, which is craziness if you ask me. In 21st century, where business is populated with multimedia and large files this can bring everything to a stillness.<\/p>\n

Solution<\/h2>\n

There are a lot of ways you can share files: ftp, web-based file upload but neither one can match convince and simplicity of email. On the internet there are services such as Yousendit<\/a> that allow someone share large files with the “convenience of email. This means that users will have to upload private and sensitive\u00a0 data to “external” servers. Many organization, just like mine, wouldn’t allow this. The only way is to have similar in-house solution that can be monitored and kept secure. ZendTo is one of the products that does it all and more.<\/p>\n

ZendTo<\/h2>\n

This is a web-based package that will let you provide a secure and easy method for your users to be able to exchange files with other people, even with external members that do not have any login rights at your organization. Unlike other commercial services, you do not have to trust your files or login rights to any other services; you keep system in-house. It will integrate with any Active Directory, LDAP or IMAP system you already have in place. Best of all it is Open Source and free.<\/p>\n

Installation<\/h2>\n

This example will be based on Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS, ZendTo 3.63 and current setup in my organization. The following software will be used:<\/p>\n

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  1. Apache 2.2.17<\/li>\n
  2. MySQL 5.5<\/li>\n
  3. ClamAV 0.96<\/li>\n
  4. PHP 5.2.6<\/li>\n
  5. phpMyAdmin 3.3.9.2<\/li>\n
  6. Postfix 2.8<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I am not covering installation of basic Ubuntu server, there are plenty of articles and manuals describing it. Assuming that you have instance of Ubuntu server running. We will be using Active Directory as means for our users to authenticate. i will be using the following in my examples:<\/p>\n