Scientist develops new and free way to send large files around the Web

A new way to send large files around the Web completely free of charge has been launched by the University of Southampton.

ZendTo is a free and secure, Web-based system, which will allow users to send large files much faster than by email. The system allows users to send files within and beyond their organisations from their own servers with no size restriction.

Julian Field, who is Postmaster for Electronics and Computer Science at the University, developed ZendTo. He says: "This is completely free and because you run it on your own site, you can be sure that it is completely safe and private and you retain complete control of your data, your system and your users."

ZendTo is particularly useful for organisations which operate in a customer service environment, since when it sends files, it incorporates customer service ticketing references, so that all the references are kept intact.

ZendTo is Julian's next big development since MailScanner, the world-leading email security and anti-spam system. He began developing MailScanner in 2000 and it has been downloaded over 1.5 million times and is used by some of the world's leading organisations in 226 countries, such as the US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command; Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge universities; Vodafone Europe; Amnesty International; Friends of the Earth; and the British Antarctic Survey. The technology is fast becoming the standard email solution at many ISP sites for virus protection and spam filtering.

Julian adds: "Ironically, the success of MailScanner and its strict security protocol means that it imposes limits on files being sent by email, which led to the development of ZendTo which has no size or type restrictions."

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More information: ZendTo is now available at: zend.to/

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antialias

5 / 5 (1) May 18, 2011

The RIAA is not going to like that one.

frajo

I fail to see anything which goes beyond old-fashioned FTP. Email was never meant for file transport and thus is the worst method to get files moved. A web-based system will never be as fast as FTP (or sFTP).

kaasinees

not rated yet May 18, 2011

I have to agree with frajo, FTP has some issues but the improved protocols of FTP are very good.

Yogaman

The previous commenters seem not to have looked at the link provided in the article.

The added-value of this package appears to be the access control and logging, including IP address, as users put and take files on the server you set control. So, RIAA probably is pleased as punch with Zendto.

Zendto's claimed speed-up is only 1.5x email, so the previous post probably is correct about an FTP server being faster, but probably not much for large files (which are this product's reason for existence, let's not forget).

Email may not have been meant for file transport, but it gets used for file transport, and so email system admins limit attachment size. Thus the need for a product targeted at large file transport.

Why the negativity for this open source, donation-ware solution to some people's needs?

Bob_B

Between people you want to share with the "Drop Box" utility is perfect for me. I play in a band (it's a long way to the top if you want to rock'n'roll) and we record all rehearsals. Now, rather than putting takes onto CD's we just put them in the drop box and they appear in the shared users drop box. I bet Drop Box is just a new type of FTP client.

In any case, it is way simpler than email and faster than 1.5x email!

@Bob_B: It's great that you like the 2GB free cloud-based storage that the basic Dropbox service gives you, or maybe you pay for up to 100GB at their presumably competitive rates, but that's not what Zendto is about; Zendto is good for much bigger datasets and controlling and monitoring access. It's huge overkill for what you want. So enjoy Dropbox.

But I doubt that you're really uploading your files to Dropbox very much faster than 1.5x the speed that large email attachments are uploaded to your email-forwarding host unless somebody has some protocol settings screwed up somewhere or else that host is slow and/or distant.

Disclaimer-such-as-it-is: I had no knowledge of Zendto's existence before reading this article.

I still don't get the negativity.

The added-value of this package appears to be the access control and logging, including IP address, as users put and take files on the server you set control.

And you cant do this with FTP?(sarcastic question) :)

not rated yet May 19, 2011

@kaasinees: If you want to know more about the differences between Zendto and FTP (which, btw, is a protocol, but I assume you meant an FTP server package), I encourage you to review the Security Defences section of http://zend.to/technical.php

dsf74

not rated yet May 21, 2011

i am puzzled how one can get excited about this tool and talk about it as if its the greatest thing since sliced bread. this looks no different than hundreds of other web based file sharing apps. FTP has been doing this for a long long time and quite well too. Now what is cool is p2p based file sharing such as pando and binfer, where u dont have to worry about centralized installation and management, and they can transfer files of ANY SIZE with incredible privacy and security. Oh and the security defenses are quite standard these days. Lastly, you can do most of what this tool claims by using a apache server and configuring the multitude of mods. just being open source doesnt make it cool or "scientific" worthy! dont want to discredit it but it seems the tool creator has few friends around certain blog sites and is trying to start a hype around this tool [i too didnt know about the existence of this tool until reading this article].

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