Anyone recommending YouSendIt in their libraries?

[Tom Keays]

Working in an academic library setting, I often work with students
who, rather than wanting to print an online journal article for a fee
on the library's networked printer, opt to email it to themselves.
This works fine when the publisher offers a built-in emailing
functionality. But not all do. Because our library workstations do not
have a mailserver available, the only way students can do this is by
downloading the article to the workstation's scratch space, opening a
web-based email client, attaching the file and emailing it to
themselves. However, students who don't use a web-based email or who
are already maxing out their disk quota are out of luck. [BTW, our
workstations do support USB thumbdrives, and many students do use
those.]

YouSendIt seems to be a workable solution. <http://www.yousendit.com/>

(Via TidBITS <http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07970>) 

    It's a free Web service that's about as simple as you could
imagine. On the YouSendIt Web page, you fill in the recipient's email
address, click the Browse button to locate the file you want to send,
optionally enter your email address and a message, and click the Send
It button. The recipient then receives an email message containing a
link that downloads the file. If you don't want to reveal your
recipient's address to YouSendIt, just send the link to yourself and
forward it manually with whatever additional text you'd like to add.

    Files can be up to 1 GB in size, and YouSendIt scans all files for
viruses (not being a virus-infected Windows user, I don't know what
happens if they discover a virus in something you send). Files remain
available for 7 days and allow only a limited number of downloads to
prevent abuse. The recipient can also click a link to delete the file
after downloading. If you want secure transfers, you can switch to a
version of the page that uses secure HTTP for both you and your
recipient; of course, that assumes you trust YouSendIt in general. You
can even put a link like the one below on your Web site that others
can use to send you files via YouSendIt.

    http://www.yousendit.com/ ? recipient= sample@ yousendit.com

-- 
Tom Keays / tomkeays at gmail.com