For a number of years I’ve been answering the same question from my wife: “What is the biggest file size that I can attach to an email?” Now the answer to this is straight out of the consultant handbook: “It depends.”
It depends on your smtp server’s limits, the reciever’s limits/security policy/attachment filtering/etc. Even Google Docs has limits for file sizes. There are a number of sites that already provide a service whereby someone can upload a file and get a link to paste into an email, so that the recipient can then download the file later. I even thought of writing one myself. watchitlater.com is actually the domain name of my proposed service to do just that. But I got sidetracked by something shiny and the need for the site disappeared as some excellent “competitor” sites appeared.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked the same question again, but it was a bit more important that I gave my wife an answer (or an ability to share very large files). So out came IntelliJ Idea, and after a bit of tinkering the S3DropBox was born. This is a Java Swing application into which you can drag and drop files, which are then uploaded to your Amazon S3 account. You can create public links to these files, and paste these links into emails, so that the files can be downloaded later (using any web browser) by clicking on the link, or you can download the files yourself at a later stage using the S3DropBox.
You can download a platform-independent version, or a Mac OSX .app bundle, or just the source code. As usual, it is a BSD license, so use it however you like, all care and no responsibility 
A note for beginners with Amazon S3: This service has a concept of buckets that contain objects. With the S3DropBox you can create buckets, and then upload files into these buckets (so that they become objects). If you want to know more about these concepts you can go to the Amazon Web Services page.
#1 by Bernd Eckenfels on 1 July 2008 - 2:30 am
Quote
Thanks, works great. I had some problem realizing that I cannot drop from a Windows Explorer ZIP Folder to your app, but then it worked.
I wonder if there is a way to revoke the time-based keys (based on groups?).
#2 by Tom on 1 July 2008 - 4:02 pm
Quote
Yeah, zip folders are a special beast on windows – difficult to get a reference to a file in a zip folder through the drag and drop interface.
Revocation of time-based keys is an interesting topic. From my understanding, you cannot revoke the public URLs (query based authentication in Amazon S3 speak). They are valid until they expire at the time you specified when you created the URL, since the expiry time is both visible in the URL and is also used to create the signature to ensure the validity of the URL.
You can actually copy an file (aka object) within the folder (aka bucket), and then delete the original, thus making all the public links to the original invalid. This functionality is not currently available via the S3DropBox, mainly because my wife hasn’t asked for it
#3 by David W. on 26 August 2008 - 8:54 pm
Quote
Tom –
Is it possible to get a pre-compiled version of this app that could be given to a client. We could then simply tell them to run it, drag and drop their large files into it… and poof… we will get them. This would be very helpful. As web developers, we often need large files from our clients. Trying to get them to use FTP can be a bit difficult at times.
Cheers
David A. West
http://www.ekzact.com
Blog – http://davidawest.com
#4 by Tom on 27 August 2008 - 12:51 pm
Quote
Hi David,
You can get a pre-compiled version of this from http://watchitlater.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/s3gui.zip
Just extract the zip file and in windows (with Java5 installed) double-click on s3gui.jar to run the app.
If your client runs Mac OSX, you could give them http://watchitlater.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/s3gui-osx.zip
Unzip the file, double-click on the DMG and drag the .app to your applications folder.
Thanks,
Tom.