Hello,

I've been asked to develop a FoxPro applicaton, which requires users to email attached AVI files back and forth on a frequent basis. I know there are better transfer methods, but the client insists on email. In fact, the client will not consider any alternatives.

The problem is that the AVI files will be huge as far as email attachments go. File sizes will be anywhere from 20MB to 500MB. This is a huge problem, since the company uses AOL and dialup modems. I don't think AOL allows anything bigger than a 15MB attachment. Even if they did allow unlimited file sizes, it would take days to upload some of those files.

I'm looking for a compression utility that will give me an extremely high level of compression. So far, I've only found products that compress the file size to about half the original. Since I probably need to keep the file sizes down to about 10MB, I doubt there is any product that can compress a 500MB file down to 2 percent of it's original size. Is there? Sorry if this sounds like a stupid question, but I really don't know too much about what's possible with compression.

I was considering using a file splitter to split the files into many smaller pieces and then compress those pieces down even further. However, that would not be very practical either, since the huge files would need to be split into too many files. I don't think the users have time to email or download 50 attachments every day. Is there any solution to this? Are there any products out there that provide extremely high levels of compression? If there are, freeware would be preferable.

Thanks for any ideas or advice,

Dave