"When you have successful people, they'll find a way to be successful," he says. For Danback, this meant some users were resorting to using Google’s Gmail on both sides of the e-mail exchange, in order to avoid client e-mail system restrictions. "That's insecure, and it's not effective," Danback says. It’s also widespread. In a recent Osterman Research study of midsize and large enterprises, 60 percent of people report they use personal e-mail accounts to do business when the corporate system doesn't work, and 17 percent of people report they use these accounts for business every day.

Danback decided to address his company's problem in early 2007 by installing an e-mail attachment appliance from Accellion.

Still an emerging category of technology products, but growing, e-mail appliances (sometimes called caching appliances or secure file transfer appliances) shift the e-mail messages with huge attachments away from your e-mail server, and into the appliance for storage. Plugging right into the network like many other appliances, these boxes address the problems with the e-mail recipient systems too. Danback has set up the appliance so that when anyone in his firm sends a message bigger than 10MB, it kicks over automatically from his Exchange server to be routed via the Accellion appliance.

When the recipient gets the e-mail message, he doesn’t get the attachment inside the message but instead clicks on a Web link to grab the document. The user can save the document to his machine's hard drive. At Integro, Danback typically sets those links to live only for 30 days. (You can adjust this time period depending on your wishes.)

Accellion boxes configured similarly to the one Danback uses cost between $5,000 and $10,000. Other vendors competing in this space include GlobalScape and Intradyn; offerings include traditional software and appliances. The products often blend some e-mail security, archiving and attachment management chores.

Of course, the old-fashioned alternative to an appliance like the one Danback set up is asking users to utilize a regular FTP server for large e-mail messages. But he rejected that option, since it would mean asking users to futz with something other than their usual e-mail client, which is in itself a barrier, Danback says. With the Accellion appliance, the user sends any message in the normal manner. Besides, Danback says, the appliance proves simple to set up and maintain.

"It's just easy. It's self-contained. It simplifies our infrastructure," Danback says.

Danback's business users like it for another reason. Because their insurance industry competitors are dealing with the same large documents and e-mail woes, anything Integro brokers can do to make their interactions with clients more seamless can only help them win business, Danback says. "We had to find a way to differentiate ourselves from our competitors," he says.