Jon -

The email thing has its limitations. Many email accounts won't accept anything larger than 2MB or so, a few don't accept anything with attachments, and what you send has to fit in the inbox or it'll get bounced. About 2MB is normal for the total user space on a lot of email servers. Sometimes you have to send an email to ask the recipient to empty his/her box in order to get yours in, even with modestly sized stuff.

Few of the files that normal people trade with any frequency are large enough to be a real size problem; but we've gone to CDs and FedEx (or snail mail) for larger files, and FTP for some. We used to use ZIP disks quite a lot, but they've sort of "faded away" in the past couple of years.

Most graphic clips, even those used in commercial publishing aren't more than 100K, frequently a whole lot less; but if you want to exchange "photo quality" pictures, you'll crowd the limits of email pretty quickly. You can attach most peoples' Word docs, but I've got several that are over 5 MB, and a couple up to nearly 30MB (backups are essential). No way to move those by email.

Most newer machines have etherlink ports, and it's pretty simple to plug a laptop in if you've set up for it, or you can still zero-modem on a serial port to move stuff to another machine (laptop) - and then carry the laptop across the street to another machine. That's the new sneaker net method, although it's only good for local moves, of course.

John