Have you ever sent an email with an attachment to someone only to discover that their inbox can't accept something larger than a few megabytes? Remember how you felt when you got that dreaded mailer daemon saying something to the effect that the email you just sent was undeliverable because the recipient's inbox couldn't accept anything larger than 10 megabytes? Did you want to kill the recipient because it took you something like an hour to upload it? Well, if that recipient is still living and in the interest of living recipients everywhere, you may want to give Pando a try.

Pando.com is an interesting melding of two technologies, namely email and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. You may remember P2P from its notorious beginnings as the technology behind the then illegal doings of the old Napster. Kids everywhere were illegally exchanging copyrighted music by sending the files directly from their computers to other computers who shared access on the P2P network. However, P2P is being used today by legitimate endeavors everywhere and now Pando has come up with a novel idea to use it as part of an email/file exchanging system.

The idea is for you to send an email with virtually any sized attachment to anyone via their email address. In reality, that's not what actually happens but Pando makes it appear as though it's happening that way. And that's a good thing because who wants to get bogged down in all the technology? You just want it to work and that's exactly what Pando does.
It makes it look like you now have the ability to email large files. But if you must know how it works, here's a brief explanation. But I suggest that after reading it, just go about emailing your large files without any more restriction worries.

To begin the process, you have to download the free Pando software from their website. Both Mac and Windows versions are available at this time.
Running the Pando software begins the process. When you wish to send a large file, you simply put in the email address of the person to whom you want to send it. You continue by composing your email and attaching the large file. When you are finished, you click on the send button and that's it.

What happens next is that the Pando server sends a regular email with a ".pando" suffix to the recipient. If this is the first time that person is using Pando, it contains a link so that they too can download the Pando application. When they run it, it begins the P2P link between your computer and the recipient's computer. Once that link is established, the file transfer begins directly from your computer to the other one which is what P2P is all about. File sent and received and that's all she wrote.

The next time you wish to send a large email to the same recipient, they will already have the Pando application so the P2P connection will happen more quickly. In addition to the ability of transfering large files, Pando adds a level of encryption that assures your data is safe from prying eyes until it reaches its intended destination.

The Pando application has a status menu that lets you see if you are signed on to the Pando network. Once you have established you are online, you can send and receive the Pando "packages." If you are offline, file transfers that are already in progress will be paused until you go back online. This is especially nice since you won't have to start all over again just because you decided to turn your computer off for whatever reason. Once you are back online, the transfer will resume from where you left off.

Currently Pando is in a beta phase and until it goes completely online, file sizes will be limited to 1 gigabyte. Still that's probably more than ample for most people and certainly beats learning too late that the file you just sent didn't make it to its destination. The premise of Pando is a good one.
It's interesting to see how they have taken the two different technologies (email and P2P) and combined them into a slick little application that makes them work together to produce an end result that was just not possible individually.

www.pando.com