Emailing a Share Link

Whenever you've enabled access control for your Share Links, you must invite recipients to the link via emailed invitations generated by the Files.com platform. Enabling access control helps to secure your link against unwanted access by people you did not intend.

Even if a Share Link doesn't require access control, sending email invitations to specific contacts allows you to track whether your expected contacts have used the link by reviewing the list of outstanding invitation recipients.

When you send email invites, you can direct it to 50 different email addresses at once. Your site includes a generous limit on the number of email invitations that can be sent for a share link each hour. In the unlikely event that you receive an error about exceeding those limits, you can try again later. If you believe you are receiving the error when you should not be, contact our support team for assistance.

When you send email invitations, the email address of the user who is sending the invitation will be used as the reply-to address for the emails. This is true even if you have customized your SMTP settings with a specific reply-to address for notification emails.

When access control is enabled for a share link, emailed links are protected against mass distribution. This prevents recipients from forwarding their links to people you did not intend to invite. Clicking on a forwarded link that's already been used will invalidate the link and generate a new email for the original recipient.

When the recipient first clicks on an emailed share link, a session is created and saved in the web browser's local storage, which is tied to that specific web browser and the email address that received the link. If the link is then visited in a different browser (either on the same computer or another computer), the share link will display an error that the invitation has already been used. When the system detects that this has happened, it will automatically generate a new email with a new link and re-send it to the original recipient.

Site administrators can restrict the domains that can receive Share Link email invitations. Files.com maintains an internal block list of thousands of known scam and free email domains. The list is refreshed regularly, and it is not published. Site administrators can automatically apply this block list to all emailed Share Link invitations, preventing your users from sharing with unapproved addresses.

For more fine-grained control, site administrators can manually supply your own list of domains to block, as well. Both lists can be used at the same time to form a comprehensive email domain blacklist.

The block lists are used for determining whether a link invitation can be sent; if your link does not require access control, web visitors can register using an address that is on either of the block lists.

Share Groups save you time when you need to invite the same groups of people to different Share Links. You can store up to 50 recipients as a Share Group, with an optional note for easy reference.

With the web interface, you can create new Share Groups at the time of sending email invitations. When you re-use a Share Group, you can also update the group members at the same time.