Email is good, but sometimes something bigger, faster or noisier is required. Think bicycle versus Harley-Davidson. Well, I don’t have the Office 2.0 version of a hog quite yet, but I found the parts and have been using them successfully.

Bigger — Sending and Receiving Large Files: YouSendIt
This free service lets you send large files (up to 1GB) that would not pass through mail servers. To use it, just enter the recipient’s email adress and upload your file. You do not even have to register with the service. Once the file has been uploaded, the recipient will receive an email telling her to go download the file from an automatically-generated URL. Once the file has been downloaded successfully, a notification gets sent to the sender (you). I used it for an 11MB file two days ago and it took less than five minutes to go from typing the YouSendIt.com URL to receiving the email notification. Simple is beautiful!

Faster — Sending Text Messages: Teleflip
When you’re sitting at your desk and need to quickly send a message to someone who might not be sitting in front of a computer, nothing beats SMS text messaging. But pulling your cell phone out and typing the message on a microscopic keypad can be frustrating when you have a perfectly working keyboard in front of you. Here comes Teleflip, a great little free service that allows you to send text messages from email: just send an email to recipientcellphonenumber@teleflip.com and that’s it. How comes nobody thought about this before?

Noisier — Sending and Receiving Faxes: eFax
Like good wine, the grand daddy of Internet faxing is getting even better with age. The free account allows you to receive faxes, the $12.95 a month eFaxPlus account lets you send faxes as well, and the $19.95 a month eFaxPro account adds voicemail to the mix. What I like about it is that you do not need to install any application to use it: for sending faxes, you simply enter a fax number and upload the file you want to send; for receiving, you just configure the service to send you .tif or .pdf files as email attachments. Many thanks to Alessandro for helping me figure out this configuration option. Tip: if you need to scan a document for archival purposes and have access to an old-fashioned fax, just fax the document to yourself and save the .pdf file you receive as an email attachment into your Salesforce.com or Openomy account.

This week end, I will try to integrate all this within my Salesforce.com account.