Which is why the incoming Deputy Dean:IT in this august Faculty plans to fly to the UK with a bag full of blank CDs to download and copy the large quantity of PDFs needed for his research. Doing it from within UCT just isn't viable.
I spent much of yesterday trying to download files from my GMail inbox - 5MB in size, on average. Yes, it was "research-related" - legitimate, completely above board. The fact that they'd been sent to my GMail account rather than UCT was, well, they'd not been delivered by late morning (having been mailed early morning) and the sender dispaired of them ever arriving and sent them to GMail instead. (The first couple have since arrived. Today.) But while I could see them sitting in my inbox on GMail, I couldn't do anything with them - trying to download them timed out each time, until I got home and fell back on good ol' dial-up.
A previous attempt, involving ever-greater numbers of ever-smaller bits of split files, eventually led to a near nervous breakdown and the mailing of the files to me on CD. First class mail from the UK costs more, perhaps, for the sender, than email, but at least it gets here in a usable format. No wonder academics from foreign climes continue to arrive here expecting lions in the streets...