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

Re:Who are the users?

[arcade]

If you are an ISP, the users are your customers, and they are right (as customers always should be).


Yes and no.

Of course, they are the ones that pay you - but one should always try to explain what is the proper way to do things.

In my opinion, at least.

Use high limits if not other way exists to xfer

[duffbeer703]

At my old job, we were screwed.

We had offices with IT and web staff in New York, Ontario, California, Michigan and Florida.

Everything was firewalled.
Email attachments was limited to 1.5MB
FTP was blocked.

At the time that I left, security policies forced us to use ICQ and AOL Instant messenger to xfer files. (Real secure, huh)