Send link to a document/draft instead of attaching it to mail

In my experience, the key concern about attachments is not the amount of space they take on the recipient's computer (most people have big hard drives these days), but whether they will cause your message to fail to be delivered. There are two issues that I frequently encounter in which attachments cause problems with email:

• Most mail servers have an upper limit on the attachment size they will allow. At the moment, this is often seems to be no more than 10MB, but I've encountered as low as 2MB.
• Aggressive protective software sometimes gets upset about attachments, especially known malware vectors like zip files.

If you trigger a filter like this, your email will disappear into a black hole and, depending on the configuration of the system that ate your email, you may not even know that this has happened. Thus, for any attachment above about 1MB or of an unusual type, I recommend sending a link instead.

Note, however, that links can also be viewed as suspicious, by either software or people, since there's a lot of nasty phishing schemes out there. Thus, I recommend not using link shorteners and if possible hosting an academic institutional server or on a well-known and semi-trusted service like DropBox.

No.

You want to make sure it is easy for the recipient to read your mail, no extra clicking and waiting. In any case, cold sent mail asking to review your work will be silently ignored. If it contains external link or not, it will pretty soon be cleaned up (or hang around forever, not looked at again).

By sending a link for a document, if the document is editable (such as google drive), you could edit the file after sending it. This way revisions could be made and would be seen without sending out a new file.

To counter this though, if the link is deleted, the file is lost. In an attachment, as long as you have email access you would still have the file.

Overall most files are not too large so that storage space does not matter. Only videos and large data sets would be hard to store, but the email program would not be able to send it in the first place as file size limits are normally about 15MB.