What is FTP?

“FTP” stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP is a standard Internet protocol (a formalized procedure for transferring digital information) that provides Web authors and other Web users with an easy way to upload and download files between computers that are connected to the Internet.

So why not use email for file transfers?

It is true that e-mail is very easy to use. And with a mouseclick you can send and receive attachments by e-mail.

However, a lot of servers refuse e-mails that are larger that a certain size. For instance, the maximum size of an e-mail message sent to or from the VUB/ULB is 16 million bytes (15.25 Mbytes). And other providers even impose more restrictive limits (sometimes even as low as 300 kbytes).

Also documents that are sent by e-mail have to be encoded in some way, making the document even larger (about one third). So a document that is 7.5 Mbytes large would become 10 Mbytes when sent by e-mail.