Stop emailing attachments: what to do instead

An email attachment is a copy of your file that you have permanently given away - multiplied by every recipient, forward, and mail server backup it touches. For plenty of files that is fine. For contracts, personal documents and anything that will ever have a newer version, it is a quiet liability that a link simply does not have.

What actually happens to an attachment

Send a file to five people and there are now at least six copies: yours and one in each inbox - plus the copies in every mail provider’s backups, every phone that synced the thread, and every inbox it gets forwarded to later. None of these can be recalled, updated or expired. An attachment has no undo.

Three consequences follow:

Stale versions circulate forever. The contract you revised on Thursday still exists in Tuesday’s form in nine inboxes, and someone will sign the Tuesday one. With attachments, “which version do you have?” is a permanent genre of email.

Your control ends at send. Wrong recipient, changed relationship, project ended - the copies persist regardless. Inboxes get breached years later with their archives intact, which is how an old attachment becomes a new problem.

Size limits shape your files. The 25 MB ceiling quietly dictates compression and quality decisions that have nothing to do with the work.

What a link changes

A share link points at the file instead of copying it, and every difference follows from that:

One canonical version. Fix a typo, re-export the deck, and everyone holding the link opens the current file. The version question disappears.

Control survives sending. A link can be revoked this afternoon or expired on a date you set when creating it - so access ends when the engagement does, by default, without you remembering anything. A password, sent by another channel, means a forwarded email is not a handover.

Size stops being email’s business. The full-resolution files travel as themselves; the email carries a line of text.

For material with real stakes - identity documents, anything medical or legal - the ladder goes further, up to restricting access to named recipients; sharing sensitive documents walks those rungs. And when the file needs to travel to you rather than from you, the same logic runs in reverse: an upload link beats asking for attachments, for all the same reasons.

When an attachment is still the right call

Honesty requires the list, and it is short: files so small and final that versioning is meaningless; recipients whose systems archive inbound mail as the record; and situations where the recipient’s access to a link cannot be assumed. A signed PDF sent for a counterparty’s records is a fine attachment. Almost everything else you attached this month was habit.

Making the switch painless

The friction is muscle memory. Three changes remove most of it:

Share from the folder, not the inbox. Files already in storage - synced by the desktop app or uploaded once - are a right-click away from a link; the upload-then-link dance is what makes attaching feel easier.

Set defaults once. If every link you create carries a sensible expiry by default, the discipline costs nothing per send. This is the set-it-at-share-time principle: decisions made once, when the control is in front of you.

Watch what leaves. An audit trail of link views and downloads replaces the attachment’s silence with an answer to “did they actually get it?” - which attachments never told you anyway.

The 5 GB free tier is more than enough to move your active sharing over and feel the difference before any money changes hands.

The one-sentence policy

If it will ever change, ever expire, or ever matter who has it: send a link. The attachment habit predates the tools that replaced it, and unlike most security advice, this change makes the workflow better on the same day it makes it safer.