Yahoo Mail offers unlimited email storage space, but unfortunately limits the maximum attachment size to just 10 MB. Gmail is in the same situation with just a 20 MB attachment; and is very picky about the file types.
If you want to send a movie of your lolcat, that is 150 MB, to your aunt Lilly what would you do? Or, maybe a PowerPoint presentation to business partners that has a lot of graphics?
Five years ago you probably had to split the file into multiple pieces and send each one over e-mail. Now you may use web services like FileDropper where you have a 5 GB size limit, but these type of services are not very reliable. Your connection may drop, and you have to restart the upload process all over again.