Win Stevens has created a new project - FileSendr Add-on. Below is how he describes the project:

Everybody is using e-mail.  Despite the availability of new social tools we are still using e-mail to send tons of information over the Internet and within the company.  Mailboxes become overloaded, system administrators have a difficult time in making daily back-ups.
Most SMTP servers impose message size restrictions.  I have no global figures but in my company the mail size is limited to 10 MB.  I know of other servers that refuse mails larger than 2 MB.  Gmail is more forgiving and allows you to send a 25 MB limit.

As Domino administrators we must warn our users and advice them to keep message size below 5 MB.  However the size of a good marketing presentation in Powerpoint goes very quickly above this limit.  

Then came FileSendr.  A wonderful XPage application written by Declan Lynch.  It could be used within your company but also for delivering big files to external contacts.  I rolled-out FileSendr for one of my customers; I informed all 1000 Notes users but - to my surprise - people were not fully happy.  Yes, they could send large mails.  But, each time they created a mail message, they had to make an estimate of the message size.  If too large they had to look-up the FileSendr URL and create the mail outside their day-to-day mail client.

With some other Domino administrators we started brainstorming.  Could we come up with a better solution without having to reinvent FileSendr ? And this with a small budget.  The answer was a FileSendr Add-on.  The idea is very simple: do tell anything to the end-user.  They are allowed to send big mails (we set the limit at 300 MB).  On the Domino server we created one additional mail rule: "if the mail is larger than 5MB move it to the FileSendr Add-on database".  This is a standard Domino feature.  No need to install a server-hook or some other tricky software.

When the router deposits the message in the FileSendr add-on database it triggers a LotusScript agent.  After a few minutes (depending on the amgr settings of your server) the agents code starts running: it creates a document in the FileSendr database, moves the body of the mail and the attachments into the document, generates a secret key and informs the recipients of the presence of the download.  Optionally, the sender of the mail is informed about the interception of the mail message.  Net result: we did not have to train the end users, adoption is automatic, users are happy.

The FileSendr Add-on application has some additional settings:
- blacklist/whitelist: you could restrict some people of using the system
- max message size
Aren't there any disadvantages ? I would say a few.  First of all the large mail will probably be stored in the Sent folder of the sender.  Secondly, the system works transparent for sending large mails.  Reception of large mails from the Internet is more difficult.  The mail will probably never arrive to our server.  

All suggestions and remarks are welcome.  Some people have already downloaded the product.  Let us know about your experiences.



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