The 2Big2Send Blog

New Feature: Folder based file retention

Thu, 03 May 2012 21:17:52 +0100

Having control over when a file is deleted is becoming more prevalent in industries especially finance and HR.

We are announcing today that you can now set a retention period on a folder so all files will be deleted within that folder when the retention period for the file has lapsed.
You may choose a retention period of either 5 Days, 1 Month, 2 Months, 6 Months, 1 Year, 2 Years & 5 Years.

To access the retention period options select “Retention Policy” from the Actions menu.

When a Retention Policy has been applied you will see how long files within the folder will stay active for before being deleted.

The retention policy applies to files that are in the folder only - when a file is moved out of the retention folder the retention policy no longer applies, the file will be kept until you delete it.

The Retention Policy feature is available on our Professional, Business and Corporate plans.

Putting your mind at ease

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:49:54 +0100

Just received a notification from your system saying that the file I sent had been successfully downloaded! I’d been waiting for our accountant to download it before leaving the office.
It saved numerous chasing phone calls and put my mind at ease.

Toby L. mailed our support team - support@2big2send.com - with the above comment.
We’re glad that our notification system is helping to keep the business world moving seamlessly and saving our customers some worry.

You can take advantage of our download notification system by registering for one of our plans.
You can opt to receive a notification for each file downloaded or when every file has been downloaded.

New Feature: Email Bounce Notifications

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:07:53 +0000

Using online systems to send your files can sometimes be a stab in the dark which is why we continue to make improvements so you know where your files are at all times.

Currently we notify you when a file is downloaded or when all files have been downloaded; we are taking this one step further and we will now notify you if the email we send with the link to you files bounces - ie: it fails to get to the recipients mailbox.

This is now enabled on all Standard, Professional, Business and Corporate plans.

So what happens when an email bounces:
We send you a quick email with the recipient we failed to send to along with the details of the bounce from the recipients mail server.
At this point it will probably be obvious that you either mis-typed their email address or the email address you used for your recipient was incorrect so you just need to login and resend the files so their correct email address.

New Feature: Set file download limit

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 07:53:58 +0000

There are some reasons you would only want a file you send to be downloaded once

To limit the distribution of a file.
To ensure only your intended recipient downloads it
To keep your account bandwidth low.

Whatever your reason we now give you the option in our new look ‘Advanced Options’ when you send files.

Its really easy to set this option - simple choose between: 1, 5, 10 or unlimited downloads per file from the menu on the send page.

This will bring some added security to your file sending.

Avoiding the Spam filter

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:30:08 +0000

Sending files online is easy - but ensuring that your files get to their final destination is a whole different thing.

We can all send an email to somebody; from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or your companies email server, chances are these emails will get to where they were directed, however when another company sends the emails for you, you are trusting them to get the email to where it is intended.

In most cases a file sending company will send via their own email servers, but by sending via their own servers how do you know that they follow up on the spam notifications they get from ISPs, or make the necessary efforts to ensure that ISPs do not single them out as a spam email service or use the internet standard for signing messages to prove they are legitimate.

It is for these reasons and a lot more that we made the decision (almost 6 months ago) to farm our email sending out to Postmark.
Postmark SPF and DKIM sign all the emails that are sent through our system; this ensures that when your recipients mail server receives your email it is legitimate and not being sent from a potentially spam source, this significantly decreases the possibility of the email being marked as Spam.

You can be sure that with 2Big2Send making your data securely available and, through Postmark sending the emails to your recipients, that the files you send will always get to their intended destination - avoiding the spam filter.

New Feature: Revoke access to files you sent accidentally

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:51:33 +0000

We’ve all been there one time or another; you fire off an email with some confidential files and you mis-typed the email address…
What do you do?

You can recall the email - if you have Microsoft Outlook and your company uses Microsoft Exchange.
You can hope that they dont read your confidential information; probably not the best.
You can keep quite and hope it all goes away - really really bad!

Or if you sent your email via 2Big2Send you can revoke access to the collection. At this point the recipient will be locked out from the files you sent them and will be unable to download them.
If they have managed to download a file before you revoked their access, you will be able to see exactly which one and can then take action.

To revoke an email:

Go to your Sent items: https://www.2big2send.com/sent
Click on the email you would like to revoke.
Click the ‘Revoke collection’ button at the top of the email.
Then confirm the revoke in the popup window.

Revoke collection

Confirm revoke

We know that this feature will benefit you by giving piece of mind that you can take action on any mishaps when sending your files through the Internet.

This feature is not available to users sending via the free trial on the home page.

Email Branding

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:05:36 +0000

2Big2Send has just released an addition to the branding configuration; we now give you the ability to change the email that is sent to your recipients, this allows you to configure it to be customised to your branding.

This is available to our Business customers through the Branding configuration page.

You get to change the text version and HTML version, the text version is normally displayed on older email clients or systems that cannot display HTML; colours, images and text formatting will not be displayed in the text version.
The HTML version lets you totally customise the look of the email right down to the colours and location of elements. Through the use of keywords like {logo} you can get the logo that is set on your 2Big2Send account to be displayed in the email or {recipient} that will input your recipients email. You can include other images but you will have to host them yourself.

To make things a little easier we included an easy way to see what your emails will look like, just click the ‘Preview Text’ or ‘Preview Email’ button.

Watch out for more Branding related posts in the near future.

Organise your files

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:37:28 +0000

You can now move your files between folders. This has been a much requested piece of functionality and will allow you to organise your files within your folders.

Just select the files you want to move, click the move link pictured below and choose the folder you want to move them to.

You can of course move individual files by clicking the move icon on the file itself.

Choose where your data is stored

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 08:02:44 +0100

With other online data transfer providers your files are most likely stored on servers in the United States of America. For personal files this is probably OK with you, but if you are a company in Europe there are sometimes laws or guidelines as to where you can legally store your data; to this end we have given our Professional and Business customers the ability to choose where 2Big2Send stores their data.

Even if you do not have rules as to where your files are stored, by choosing to upload them to a data centre closer to where you are can significantly increase your upload speed; likewise if you wanted to ensure that your European customers got the fastest download speeds, store your files in our European data centre.

To choose where your data is stored simply visit your Account :: Storage page (https://www.2big2send.com/account/storage)

As we are using Amazon’s S3 Storage Service we have the option to store files in a data centre in Japan or Singapore; if you would like to see these as an option on your account please let us know.

Enhanced Delivery Download Notifications

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:04:13 +0100

We have introduced an enhancement to our download notification system. You can now choose to receive an email notification when each file is downloaded or when all the files have been successfully downloaded. You can also choose to select a different email address to send the notifications to, so you can send them to your_name+2big2sendnotifications@example.com for filtering.

To enable delivery notifications browse to Account :: Notifications (https://www.2big2send.com/account/notifications).

The next iteration of this system will allow you to send have your notifications delivered to your Boxcar enabled mobile device or computer.

Send Expiring Emails

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:11:23 +0100

You may have a situation where you want to send somebody a few files, but you only want them to be able to download them for a certain amount of time… We have just enabled the feature that will allow you to do this.

It is a simple advanced option you can choose when you send your files.

Attach files directly to messages

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:48:17 +0100

Calling all registered users…
We’ve finally introduced the ability to attach files directly to a message you send via 2Big2Send.

This will make sending your files much easier and ultimatly quicker because you can upload and send in one-fell-swoop!

FTP Replacement

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:31:03 +0100

FTP has been being used to transfer files to well over a decade. This ageing technology has unfortunately not kept up with the requirements of modern day business.

FTP required you to either share all files in a folder or go through the whole process of setting up a new user to only share one folder, then you had to send your recipient a username and password and probably explain to them how to access the files.

2Big2Send alleviates all these problems.
You simply upload your files to our servers and attach them to an email on our website; we send your recipient an email with a link to the files you uploaded and attached where they can simply click the file and download it.

What makes our service even better than FTP is that you can configure your account to send you an email when your recipient downloads a file you sent them so you will be in no doubt that they received the files you sent.

2Big2Send has been Upgraded

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 08:46:41 +0100

It has been a long time in the works, but 2Big2Send has finally been upgraded!
This upgrade makes our service faster, easier to use and more reliable.

The initial response from users is great and we hope the rest of you are finding the same things.
We will have a steady stream of upgrades and new features in the months to come, some of these are:

A hosted Dropbox for you to receive files.
Customised emails.
Notifications.
Offsite Backup utilities.
European hosting of files.
and many more…

Watch this space for these new features and more!

Do you know where your data is going?

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 09:02:42 +0000

We have seen in the media recently, here, here and here, that corporate data loss is everywhere; but it is mainly coming from the actions of your employees rather than outside hackers.

We are rolling an auditing suite into our next release which will give you the ability to track who sent files, who they were sent to and when and where they were downloaded.
Coupled with this will be an optional layer of security which will validate that the user you sent the file to is the only person who can download the file.

We're still here!

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:36:00 +0000

It has been a very long time since we posted anything here, so now is as good a time as any!

What have we been up to?
Don’t worry we have been hard at work behind the scenes answering your support tickets and keeping the current infrastructure up and running.
The rest of our time has been spent creating a more streamlined service for you all to you.

We started from scratch with this one and created our own framework and API to support it; implementing new features and changes will be a much easier thing so expect new features often!

Over the past couple of years we have seen the stability of the Flash uploader get really bad - and it is not coming from us; the reliability of Flash even when handling files of 50MB was really bad.
Browser crashes, uploads failing and slow transfers are what we have had to put up with…
Not anymore - we’ve been working on a Java uploader, the same technology Facebook has used, it’s much more reliable and will allow us to handle bigger and bigger files.

2Big2Send Infrastructure

We have used Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) since the beginning and have not had any reliability issues; so it made sense to move our servers into Amazon’s Cloud offering (EC2) as well.
We have noticed a considerable speed increase on our staging servers since the move.

So when is this coming?

Very soon - we are in the final stages of getting it all tied together, so for now here is a screen shot of what is to come!

More secure file sending

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We know a lot of people don’t think twice about security; but it is getting to the point where we have to start.

At the moment when you send your files the recipient gets an email with a link that they follow and can automatically download; for the more security concious ones this may seem too easy.

So we have just rolled out passworded file sending. This gives you the ability to set a password on the collection so when the user goes to get their files they are required to enter the password first.

The password is not sent along with the files - that would be stupid - so remember to give it to your recipients after you send them something.

Happy New Year!

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year from the 2Big2Send Team.

2009 was a great year in terms of growth for us, we are hoping 2010 is even better! There are many things we have planned for the coming months - so watch this space!

Service Update

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Helloooo!

For the past 4 months we have been rebuilding 2Big2Send from the ground up and the result it our new look website. Everything execpt the database data has changed making a whole load easier to bring out new features; you should also notice a big increase in speed.

So What Has Changed?

The short answer is everything - but here is a nice breakdown :)

Dashboard - This has now been changed to Files and Folders as it makes a whole lot more sense. All of your files and folders are listed here in a much easier way to understand.
Folders - You can now create multi-dimensional folders so you can better organise your data.
Uploader - The upload status is now a lot more meaningful. We also changed the way we are verifying files so there will be little or no failed uploads.
Send - We totally overhauled the sending page as it looked like it was created by some kid in school. It is now organised into folders so you don’t have to go searching through file names to find a file you uploaded. We also made adding recipients easier so you can see who you are sending to, they also autocomplete so you don’t have to type the entire email address in.
Mailing Lists - Our premium customers who send emails to the same groups of people over and over again can now put them into a mailing list and send to the entire mailing list, it saves typing in all their email addresses.
Collection & Shared - A total overhaul has been done to these pages; gone is the horrible outline of the website, you now just get a list of the files you sent/shared on a simple to understand page.
Account - The account page is loads easier to get your head around, all organised into nice sections. We even added in the facility to add an avatar to your account which is displayed at the top of your pages and on the collection page so people know at a glance who sent them the files.
Gallery View - When you upload a picture (JPG, GIF, PNG or BMP under 10 MB) we will process it into a resized picture so you can click the ‘Open Gallery’ button at the bottom of folders containing photos to bring up a nice gallery. The original file can still be downloaded by click on the file name.
Contacts - We overhauled the contacts page; now you can easily add/edit and delete your contacts. Import functionality will be added in the coming weeks.

There are a couple of other changes; free users are no longer able to automatically store their files, but you can extend the expiry of the file by hovering over the file and selecting ‘Extend Expiry’. This will add 5 days to the expiry from the time clicked, this can be done as many times as you please.

The uploader is a little bit more intelligent in that if you are in a folder and click the ‘upload’ button it will upload the files to that folder making organisation easier.

There isn’t much else to tell - apart from expect a whole wave of new feature throughout this year :)

Thank you for your continued support.

Jamie.

The new uploader

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0100

What’s The Difference?

You can upload multiple files from the same window
It shows you when a file is totally uploaded and verified
The upload does not start automatically ie: when you don’t expect it to
We added better handling for multi byte characters ie: Chinese/Japanese file names
You can stop and start the uploads at your leisure
Files that you added by accident can now be removed

What’s To Come?

We will be adding a better uploading progress report
It will show an estimate your average uplaod speed
Based on your speed we will show roughly how long the current file will take to upload
There are a couple of other things to be added here but we are keeping our lips sealed for a little longer.