Best new Firefox addin: AllPeers

Fed up with email messages bouncing because your attachments are too big? There's a simple solution -- get a very good new Firefox add-in, AllPeers.

It's a simple peer-to-peer file-sharing app. Set it up, select files you want to share, and who you want to share them with, and the person gets a notification. He can then grab them. It's that simple.

I used it just this week when an email server choked on a 10MB file I had to send. I can't say the procedure was glitch-free, though, because for inexplicable reasons, the person with whom I was sharing the file couldn't get it for a few hours. The app is in beta though, so it may just be a beta bug.

The add-in solves a problem that's only getting worse. File sizes are growing practically exponentially, as media files become increasingly mainstream. Yet mail servers continue to refuse to handle large files. And servers' aggressive spam filters increasingly reject files with attachments, because they deem them as spam.

For the moment, AllPeers runs only under Firefox, but expect it to work with Internet Explorer some time in the future. If you've ever had a problem with sending a file via email, it's worth a look.