Email is still the easiest way to send files to people (or even yourself), but if you need to send something much larger than a picture, it all tends to fall apart. Fortunately, Mail Drop can help you email large files from your iPhone. Here’s how to use it.
There are many reasons why you find yourself with a large file on your iPhone or iPad that needs to be sent to someone else. Numerous third-party solutions have popped up trying to solve this problem – cloud storage providers like Dropbox have been particularly successful – but they tend to require additional apps to install or can be confusing for your recipient to navigate.
Mail Drop is powered by Apple’s iCloud service. Image credit: Apple
Email, on the other hand, is as simple as things tend to be. Press your message, tap to attach the file you need to send and send your email; iPhone will upload your file to your mail provider’s servers (think Google’s Gmail or your company’s email server, for example) and to the recipient. Finally you can easily click the file to download it.
Things start to get a little messy when you have to ship something big. Sometimes your mail provider may not support large attachments or the mailbox of the person you sent the file to may be full.
Mail Drop works automatically. If you have one or more files to send, you cannot force their use; It should be big enough for your iPhone to think you might have trouble sending it to someone else.
Requires using your iPhone’s built-in Mail client – if you prefer to use an alternative app, you’ll need to find another way to transfer your files.
Mail Drop works with files up to 5GB in size – it doesn’t matter what the files are, but if taken as a group – less than 5GB. If you need to send more than 5GB via email, you need to split it into multiple messages. If it’s a single file larger than 5GB in size, you should try a service like Dropbox.
Mail Drop uses Apple’s cloud service iCloud as its backbone. Attachments sent via Mail Drop will remain live on iCloud servers for up to 30 days.
You’re limited to one terabyte of iCloud storage (1000GB) for free with Mail Drop. How do you reach that limit if you’re stuck at 5GB per message? It’s not that hard to send several messages in a day; however, there is a good chance that you will never reach this hard limit. If you manage to do this, your capacity will gradually be restored as your sent messages reach the 30-day limit and are deleted from iCloud servers.
Finally, if you send your message (with the Mail Drop attachment) to a large number of people (or your recipient shares the link), Apple may disable the link to get a huge boost in traffic. Sharing with just one person or a small group of family or friends shouldn’t suffer that penalty, so don’t worry.
How to use Mail Drop to Send Large Files from Your iPhone:
Open the x app on your iPhone and fill in the fields as if you were sending a regular email.
After typing your email message, press a blank space in the body of your email (the body is where you’re typing the main message) to open a drop-down menu. Select the photos, videos, or other files you want to upload (add photo or video goes to your Photos app, Add Attachment selects files from iCloud Drive or other pre-installed services/apps).
you can also attach your files directly to an email from various apps – simply click the share buttons and select your Mail app as the sharing tool.
After the attachments you want appear in your email message, simply click send. If you have media files like photos or videos, Apple may show you a popup asking about the quality and resolution of the images – unless you have severe bandwidth restrictions, there’s no real reason not to send the originals.
After you get past this screen, Apple will ask if you want to send the files via Mail Drop if triggered. Simply tap ‘Use Mail Drop’ and your iPhone will upload and send your files in the background and add an iCloud link to your message instead of the original files.
Once your target receives the email, all they have to do is open it and click the iCloud link to download the original files.
