Calling all Techies, I need help!!!!!!!

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Ok, so last fall I got this new laptop when I started college. I knew it had a web cam/camera in it, but had never used one before, nor did I know the first thing about them. I kept seeing this little camera icon pop up in the bar on the bottom of the screen, every time I turned on my puter. It said, camera assistant software. Well, since I don't have a digital camera I thought this was irrelevant to me, and I tried to get it to go away. But I couldn't, it kept coming back. So today, out of curiosity, I opened that bad little icon up. It was the webcam. DUH!!!! Anyway, I played around with it, and figured out how to take still pictures and how to get them into the folder I want them instead of some random location where I'll never find them. I then played with the webcam recording features, and I figured out how to record myself. Here's where I need help. I tried to record a short greeting to send to my mom, and wanted to allow my kids to do that too. But the files are enormous. My email only allows 10MB, and a 5 second recording takes up almost 8MB. And that is after I chose the option to compress the files, before I did that the shorty film took up almost 17MB. Is there any way I can compress these more, or save them to a different program, or maybe there's some online sharing site I don't know about. I don't know, all this techno stuff is still pretty new to me. Thank you in advance for any suggestions!!