How to receive a large file with Podmailing

How to receive a large file with Podmailing

Has someone sent you a podmail? Is it your first time? Congratulations! This page explains step by step how to receive a podmail: a potentially huge file delivered by the Podmailing service. It is very easy, but should you encounter any problem, you will find explanations and a walk through below.

By the way, have you installed the Podmailing software yet? If not, you should follow our installation tutorial first.

Here are the instructions to follow:

You have received a podmail notification email in your inbox

If this e-mail does not appear in you inbox: it is likely that it has been thrown away by your anti-spam filter. In that case, search for it in your spam box and mark it as non-spam. To prevent this problem from happening again, add the address "delivery@podmailing.com" to your contacts list. If the e-mail cannot be found even in your spam box, please check with the sender that he is using the proper email address to reach you.

The notification email informs you that a large file was sent to you

The notification contains information about the file to be downloaded: its name, its size, the personal message from the sender and even a preview image:

If the image does not appear: reactivate image display for all messages from "delivery@podmailing.com".

Now, you must have noticed that the name of the file is underlined and blue... well yes, it is a link that you must click to reach the podmail delivery page.

The delivery page offers 3 ways to get the large file you were sent

1. Download it in your Web browser:
   this enables you to receive the file wihout installing or configuring any software.
2. Download it with Podmailing:
   this is the recommended method, which enables you to keep all your received podmails in one place and to monitor downloads in the best conditions.
3. Download it with BitTorrent:
   this method is proposed to satisfy our most geeky users, who will understand what it is about. More details on BitTorrent support here.

The green progress bar indicates 100% if the file has been fully uploaded by the sender to our servers. If that is the case, you can retrieve the file even if the sender shuts down his computer. Note that this is required in order to download the file using a plain http transfer in the Web browser. Otherwise, the bar shows a partial upload in progress:

Open the podmail and track your large file transfers

For the next step, it is recommended to install the Podmailing software.

If Podmailing is installed, all you need to do is click the "Download it with Podmailing" link, or the name of the file itself. Your browser then downloads a small file named after the file that you want to retrieve, with a ".zed" extension. Example: "Wedding video.zed".

Now open this ".zed" file with the Podmailing software.

If your computer does not do it automatically, instruct it to always open ".zed" files with the Podmailing software.

Then, Podmailing takes care of the download of the file. You can monitor the progress of the download anytime by clicking on the corresponding row.

When the bar reaches 100%, the file is complete:

Note that the amount of sent data (expressed in MB) can be less or more than the size of the transferred file itself. That happens when you contribute to the transfer of a file to several recipients, or when several  people contribute to upload a file.

Podmail: received! Your large file or folder has arrived!

Once the podmail has been 100% downloaded, you can find it in the podmail reception folder. Its default location is...

On Windows: "My documents/Podmailing"

On MacOS X: "home/Podmailing" (home refers to your user folder

Then you can click the buttons on the right side of the info panel of the podmail details:

"Open": to open it directly

"Show in the Explorer": to locate it on your hard drive

You can also click the button named "My received files" to simply open the podmail reception folder.

Resuming after a large file or folder transfer interruption

One more detail: if your file is really large, say several hundreds of Mega-bytes, then it may take some time to receive it entirely - sometimes even several hours.

If you wish, you can shut down your computer or your Internet connection before the transfer is complete, no problem. As soon as the Internet connection is up again, the transfer picks up where it left off!

Transfer resuming generally starts automatically after a few seconds. If it does not, check your Internet connection. And in some cases, you can stimulate the transfer by clicking the button Pause transfer" and then "Resume transfer".