2GB is two
thousand times larger than the maximum size I consider 'polite' to send over email -- 1 megabyte. Even these days I doubt it would fit in a lot of people's inboxes, and many email servers would rather time out than wait hours on end for the file to get uploaded and downloaded.
How well the file compresses depends on what it is. Text can compress very well, but the compression you get for anything else are unpredictable. Unless you get
extremely efficient compression, it's not going to help a lot since you have to beat the 25+%
overhead base64 email encoding uses to send binary files.
There's three ways I'd usually handle this:
- Set up a file server on the UNIX server(http, ftp, sftp, things like that) Windows needs to retrieve the file from, so the Windows user can download the file at their leisure. What kind of server depends on what features you need, what programs have to use it, and what kind of security is necessary.
- Set up a file server on the Windows machine(usually FTP) so the UNIX machine can upload the file automatically to the Windows one.
- Find a smarter way to bundle up the necessary data. Do they really need the entire 2-gigabyte monolith, every single time?
How to send large file through E-mail IN Unix AIX