Attaching large files in email had never been a smooth affair. That however might just be an issue of the past from now on. Google has now integrated Google Drive with GMail letting you send files of size of upto 10 GB over email.
How is it going to work?
The integration here seems to be surprisingly clean. To attach files in your emails using Google Drive you can just click the new drive icon in the compose window. You can then attach the files without leaving Gmail. This particular feature is going to help a lot when composing large emails with attachments.
In case the files that you wish to send are not shared to any of the recipients, Gmail will automatically prompt you to do so before sending. This will even work with links that are directly pasted from Google Drive.
The Benefits
Many fold. Firstly, as mentioned earlier you can send files upto the size of 10 GB in email which is a whopping 400 times more than the traditional email attachment size of 25 MB. Secondly unlike static attachments that are normally sent, all the recipients will be having the access to the same, up-to-date version of the file, which is a basic feature of Google Drive.
The Catch
Before getting on your feet, to use the new Drive integration into Gmail, keep in mind that you will have to opt-in to use the new compose window for Gmail. Also the feature though announced is still being rolled out to various parts of the world, meaning it may take some time to see the tiny Drive icon tucked in the Gmail Compose Window. Also it has to be seen if the drive integration allows direct attachment of the files to the mail without the files already being stored in Google Drive.
The Competition
Mind you, Gmail is not the only service which offered to upload large files as attachments using its own cloud storage service. Microsoft has taken the lead in this as Outlook (formerly Hotmail) had the options to upload large attachments through SkyDrive for quite a while. Though the file size at 300 MB in this case is considerably limited for SkyDrive. It will be not surprising if following this announcement Microsoft increases the maximum file size limit
