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?

Comments

education is the only way

[synq]

A little education goes a long way.

To my opinion education is the only way your users will know what to do.

Putting a size limit on your e-mail server doesn't learn them anything exept that their e-mail administrator is a complete *ss (in their view).

E-mail size limits only help if you explain to your uses why they shouldn't send files by e-mail if there is another way and, how they should share documents. For example by providing a common storage place by http or ftp somewhere. These sharing tools however have to be just as simple as sending e-mail for people to use them.

Re:Sounds pretty good

[markwelch]

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.

Do you offer "less-skilled" employees an easy tool to upload large files to a web site and assign an individual password for that file (perhaps even with a form to indicate the email address to send the file info to)?

So many arguments, so little grasp

[gruntvald]

This thread has so many arguments against attachments, but I don't understand why.

• email wasn't designed for files So why was UUENCODE and UUDECODE, then later MIME created? It wasn't invented by Microsoft for use in Outlook!
• It's too much disk usage, it'll bring your mail server down So size your mail server according to your projected users needs. You did do a needs analysis before submitting your budget, didn't you?
• It hurts people on dial up Why would you treat every user the same? Remember the needs analysis you did?
• Too much bandwidth usage! if you can't afford it, put limits
• use ftp instead do you really think the sales managers and Project managers want to get You to set up an account for every person they deal with who needs to send them documents? No matter when they need them?
• ftp is secure over ssh so you're going to produce documentation for each user on how to use this new software they have to download? "I need to send you a 2Mb file!" "No can do, let me contact our sysadmin on monday so he can set up an account and tell you what software to download to accomplish this". Please.
• no compromise can be reached! plenty of folks here set 650Mb attachment limits. Know how they can do that? They know their systems, and did capacity planning, they've come up with limits they can handle that work for the users. Often they have different limits for different users

email attachments are here to stay, they replace physical media, and get us closer to the paperless office. The inventors of MIME didn't consider it a gross abuse of the medium, why should you?