As electronic communication continues to grow, and online collaboration becomes a business norm, the sharing of large files becomes a practical necessity. Originally, email was not designed to accommodate large file transfers, and implementing this functionality became much easier said than done.
As time progresses, people need to share larger files. Traditional email cannot accommodate this need. One of the major issues is that with ‘push’ architecture, large file sizes can bog down a recipient’s email access, as enormous files are downloaded at the same time as relatively tiny text-based emails.
email2 effectively solves this problem by fundamentally rejecting the ‘push’ architecture and adopting a more user-based ‘pull’ architecture. Users are not forced to download unwanted files, nor are they forced to download attachments in order to retrieve the rest of their email messages. Large attachments can be downloaded at a user’s leisure.
Attachments are stored on the Private Email Networks (PEN) encrypted in multiple pieces. Because of this, and because email2 relies on HTTPS (128-bit encryption SSL) instead of standard mail protocols, an integrated download accelerator can be used to download several pieces of the same file in parallel. This can substantially reduce the time required to download large files; in some cases, download speeds can be increased by up to 400%.
Additionally, reliance on an HTTPS based ‘pull’ architecture eliminates download size restrictions. Users can attach and retrieve files as large as they would like, provided that they have the bandwidth and network resources to accommodate such transfers.
// Edited July 2008