Slashdot Mirror
E-Mail Size Limits?
Technoman asks: "I work for a company that for the past four years has restricted individual e-mail messages to 5 meg each. We now have users suggesting that this limit is to small and hinders them in performing their job. I would like to know how others are using size limits, and if not how they deal with large e-mails." As human communication over the net becomes more and more complex, the "acceptable size" of an email message will increase. 10 years ago, if you got an email over 10k, something was seriously amiss; but these days, that is just a flash in the pan. Many people rely on email, not FTP to transfer files, and things like a few family portraits can easily exceed several megs in size, so drawing the line for all users may not be as easy as you think, depending on your users and your network. Put simply, if you were the administrator of an e-mail server, what would you set the maximum size of an incoming email message to be, and what would be the reasoning behind said limit?
The problem with saying "put larger files on a web site or ftp site" is that most people can't figure out how to do that properly, or if they do it, they make the file visible to ANYONE (including search engines) so that confidential data might be lost.
Right! Luckily, e-mail is highly secure.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Putting a large file on an ftp site that is password protected and sending an email with a url containing the password and username already is just as secure as sending an email. The added benefit is, you've also then got logs to see if the file has been accessed, which you can't guarantee with email.
http://www.22balmoralroad.net/ http://www.tinynetworks.co.uk/
A couple of years ago, email in my wife's department ground to a halt when a departing administrator sent out this (paraphrased) message:
And he attaches a 7 meg MP3 and sends the message to 300 people....
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Me:Good afternoon, welcome to CustomerIsAlwaysRightNet, how can I help you?
Them:yOUR BLOODY SERVER IS BROKEN AGAIN, FIX IT now!!! i'M RUNNING A BUSINESS HERE, YOU'RE COSTING ME MONEY, i WANT A MONTH'S CREDIT ON MY ACCOUNT BECAUSE i HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO CHECK MY EMAIL FOR THREE MINUTES NOW!!!
Me: Of course sir. Here at CustomerIsAlwaysRightNet, the customer is always right, so it's perfectly obvious that I need to go and fix our broken password file. The customer is always right, so you couldn't possibly...ooo, I don't know, left your CAPS LOCK key on or anything ludicrously stupid like that.
Your month's credit for the three minutes of lost time because of our terribly broken mail server? I'll put that on your account straight away. In fact, I'd better make it two months, seeing that our monumental stuff-up has inconvenienced you so greatly...
Listen, moosh - if I had a dollar for every half-witted maroon who's given me an ear-bashing because they KNOW that it's OUR system that's stopping them from getting online because we've been really mean and nasty and made their modem turn itself off, or even gone round to their houses, broken in in the middle of the night, and actually UNPLUGGED the phone line from the back of the computer (At least, I guess that must be how it got to be unplugged, none of our Always Right customers would do that so they could make a phone call and then forget to plug it back in again, would they?), I wouldn't be sitting here listening to this pompous TIT rant at me that his WinXP heap of parrot droppings that he paid six grand for from Myers is the most advanced computer money can buy and he's not going to be paying this $200 overage because it's our accounting system that is, quote, "up the shit", and (not only, but also) we've given his username and password to someone else and let them connect to the internet with it (and somehow convinced Telstra to give them his PHONE NUMBER to do it with as well - callerID, anyone?), run up this huge overage with it - the Imesh in his startup folder, of course, has nothing to do with it, neither do the six different ad servers, DNS hijackers and spyware toolbars running on his system, and the fact that the 'Connect To' window is popping up every thirty seconds or so is entirely something OUR COMPUTERS are doing to him...
Go on, ask me if I'm going to let you send a 50 MB email to everyone in your address book. Ask me, go on..I WANT you to ask me...
Need...beer...urge...to kill...rising...