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

Email size

[dpoulson]

Our company restricts emails to 2meg, and we rarely have any problems with that. On the few occasions that a large email needs to be sent, the IT department will temporarily raise the quota. Personally I hate receiving emails over 1 meg in size!

Sounds pretty good

[Tolchz]

Five meg sounds like a pretty good limit to me. In fact it may be a little high. There are still many people on dialup to whom 5 meg is a 35 or so minute download.

My own personal opinion is that if a message is over one meg I put it up on an web site and place the url in the message. If its over 100 megs then I'll choose some format that is easily resumable (DCC, FTP, etc.) .

If people get in the habit of sending massive emails you will start to get mysterious complaints about mail getting rejected. After finally getting your users to give you the returned mail message you'll discover that not all mail servers even accept large mail. Some will reject it as being too big.

Re:Sounds pretty good

[crath]

Our Corporate email system limits email size to 2 meg. The IT department also provides an officially supported FTP/SAMBA server, with Internet facing and Intranet facing access. Got a big document? Send an email with a link to the document on the FTP/SAMBA server. If the receiver needs to save a copy of the document, they copy it off the server. If a copy isn't permanently needed, it will be automatically be purged from the FTP server (depending upon what directory you've dropped the file into: 1-day drop box, 5-day drop box, 30-day drop box, etc.).

Re:Sounds pretty good

[Blkdeath]

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.

Of course, you could have a pre-determined location with a previously known username and/or password, else you could tell them something like "The password is the name of your childhood dog of fifteen years." - something that wouldn't be easily known, and would presumably take someone long enough to figure out that the file would already be retreived and deleted.

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.

That is true, mostly. With e-mail return receipts and MTA "Send Failure" logs are all configurable by the manager of the particular client/servers, wheras FTP logs tend to be a bit more reliable. (Note: I said "tend to be". ;) )

I'd also like to note that Microsoft is planning to possibly remove access to attachments in Outlook altogether, quite probably due to all the bad press about their piss-poor handling of insecure (or "Level 1") attachments.

So what we have is not only a problem where many mail servers will continue to refuse messages greater than 5MB in size, we also have issues with many e-mail providers (HotMail, Yahoo, Softhome, etc.) restricting people to 5MB TOTAL mailbox size, with dial-up users cursing you out for sending them a 45 minute download (they COULD use something that previews the messages on the server and prune the big ones before downloading, but hey ... ), and with umpteen tens of thousands of viruses/worms/trojans that are perpetually mis-handled by retarded mail clients, and more and more companies, ISPs, etc. either virus scanning, removing potentially harmful, or flat-out removing access to all attachments on incoming and/or outgoing mail (for virus and security / confidentiality reasons).

It's very rare that I send an attachment that can't be embedded in the e-mail itself (a .DOC file that could be copy/pasted) or linked to from a webserver (even GeoCities or something would be easy enough - that's point and shoot, and many free web hosting companies virus scan uploads for you anyways).

Size limits ARE needed

[shdragon]

At the company I presently work for, almost EVERY email has an attachment (an excel spreadsheet and a word document). On occassion, those too lazy to type have sent in their scanned TIFF files. I recieved a 48 page TIFF file the other day that 140MB. I deleted it without opening it and told them to re-send in a smaller format. However, everyone else in my office is completely oblivious to the fact of the size of an email and replication. a 10MB attachment sent to 200 people occupies a lot of space REALLY quick. Especially since by default Save sent items and forwards contain the attachments. Everyone else in my office chalks up large attachments to "Outlook being broke" and asks me to come fix it. I then explain to them that they're trying to d/l a large file and just wait (stupid 2B channel ISDN). I recently convinced the Home Office that a size limit of 5MB was needed and exceptions could be made as needed. So far, nobody has needed one. :)

A little education goes a long way. People need to be taught some of what goes on in order to understand why doing XYZ is a bad idea.

Software Delivery

[Kiaser Zohsay]

My organization delivers software installers and updates to users primarily via web downloads. And pretty regularly, there is someone who can't get to the download area of the web site for whatever reason (web proxy is down, don't have/dog ate the password, the regular guy isn't here today) who wants us to "just email" him the files. Our main install is just a tad over 5 MB, which straddles the line for some people. Also, there is the occaisional need to get a particular file to an individual user, and email is the prefered method in this case.

Lately, the biggest obstacle is not file size, but attachment filters. Almost nobody can recieve an .EXE file directly (which all of our installers are), and our own incoming filter will delete .EXE files from *inside* a zip file! To send me an .EXE, you have to not only zip it, but password the zip file!

Thank you, MS Outlook, for these innovations in the use of email.

I am

[MarkusQ]

...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?

I am the administrator of an e-mail server. Our limit is 5Mb. I found that to be a reasonable elbow in the curve between most of our trafic by message count (e.g. Things like "I'm running late...could you hold off processing xxxx for me?" and "No.") and the majority by size (e.g. "Here's a copy of that set of porn CDs I stole"). It only affects legitimate bussiness trafic about once a year (we don't use MS Office, etc.) and it cuts our total storage volume by about 80%.

-- MarkusQ