In several of our past blog entries, we’ve been hammering the fact that not all file transfer solutions are created equal – because there is a difference between what a business needs in a file transfer solution and what a consumer‐focused service or free file hosting service provides (or more accurately, does NOT provide).

An interesting question was raised by a Government law department seeking to use LeapFILE to transfer files: does a party lose its right to claim attorney client privilege over a communication otherwise privileged by using a service like LeapFILE to transmit that communication? The rationale for breaking the privilege is that the communication has been shared with a third party (i.e. outside of attorney and client).

One of the highlights for LeapFILE during the recent California Accounting and Business Show was our Honorable Mention for the CPA Technology Advisor’s Annual Innovation Award for our secure file transfer and storage service. The Innovation Award is a recognition of  various technologies that benefit accounting and tax professionals. The winners were announced and presented with the award during the first day of the show.

The question raised in Part 1 actually points to an issue that will rear its ugly head as more and more cloud computer services are utilized by businesses to cover data intensive applications from file transfer, storage, disaster recovery, archiving and work collaboration. Can a law firm still claim attorney client privilege if it intentionally and knowingly transmits a communication to a client through a 3rd party provider?

A recent article was published on USA Today that covered a well-known vendor for file transfer services and also mentioned several others within this space. Obviously, I read this with great interest, but was initially dismayed that LeapFILE was not even mentioned, even though I had a quick chat with the reporter who wrote this article when he was doing his research.

10 MB or less is generally considered a good size limit for email servers.   Increasing the limit beyond this can make the server unreliable or vulnerable to attacks for the reasons listed below. 

In many cases, because your email client (a program such as Outlook) does not communicate with the server about the size of the file, the whole email including the attachment will be sent, which can take a long time, and then the server will ‘bounce’ the email, sending the whole email back to you along with a message saying the email is too big to send! 

Firstly, in order to complete a delivery, your recipient’s email server has to have the same capability to receive it. Even if you set your server to have a 20 MB limit, your 15 MB email can’t be delivered if your recipient has a server with a size limit of 10 MB.

Secondly, big size files may crash the email server. Size limits are also needed to avoid malicious users sending very large files in order to crash the server.  They also reduce the amount of disk space needed to store the email messages on the server.

When you send an email with an attachment, there are two types of size limit that can cause your email to bounce back as “undeliverable” – the message size limit of both the sender’s and recipient’s email servers, and the size limit of the recipient’s inbox.

Every once in awhile, we get asked the question “we’re considering your service and [insert file hosting service here]…what’s the difference?”  Most people who ask this question usually want to achieve one thing – to get files from one person to another.  While you can technically use a file hosting service to send a file to someone and thus may seem the same as a file transfer service, they are in fact very different in the way they work and should be used.