Lots of rivals pop up for YouSendIt file-transfer service

— -- YouSendIt used to be the only way to get around stingy e-mail attachment size limits, but with lower bandwidth costs and speedier Internet connections, a host of competitors have emerged to offer bigger file transfers at lower prices.

YouSendIt is a website offering a way to get video clips, music files, huge photos or graphics files to friends and clients without clogging up e-mail in-boxes. You simply upload your material to the site, and it takes care of the rest. The service is free for files up to 100 megabytes, or $9.99 a month for files up to 2 gigabytes.

The company, which has been around since 2004, dominates Google search results for queries such as "big e-mail attachments" or "send big files." So dozens of competitors have come up with similar names — such as MailBigFile, TransferBigFiles and SendThisFile.

"Every successful business has copycats," says Ranjith Kumaran, YouSendIt's CTO and founder.

Many of YouSendIt's competitors are based elsewhere. Sendspace is in Austria, DropSend and MailBigFile are in the United Kingdom, SendYourFiles is in the Netherlands— places where they don't have to comply with U.S. copyright laws that restrict transmission of illegally obtained movie, TV show and music files.

Gartner analyst Frank Kenney says the managed-file business is worth $600 million today and will grow to $1 billion by 2012.

"Our e-mail boxes have gotten smaller, we're not getting the room we necessarily want to have to send big files, and we need help," he says.

Fueling the demand for file-transfer services: File sizes are growing. Higher megapixel counts on digital cameras mean bigger file sizes for photos. And the popularity of homemade video creates a problem for folks who want to e-mail clips. Video files are huge: One hour of uncompressed video is 13 GB.

Many corporate e-mail accounts limit attachments to 5 MB, while free e-mail programs will give you only 5 to 20 MB. (MSN's and Yahoo's limits are 10 MB, AOL mail is 16 MB, and Google's Gmail is 20 MB.) That's enough for a small group of uncompressed photos, PDFs or graphic files, but not enough for most videos or bigger photos.