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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?
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!
http://www.22balmoralroad.net/ http://www.tinynetworks.co.uk/
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.
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.
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
Okay, I'm sure I'll sound like a elitist prick to some people, but I really don't care. What you should do, is to _educate_ people in what the Internet consists of, and what medium you should do to do what.
Explain to people that sending large emails really isn't very nice, that you'll most likely increase the overhead due to the way the files are encoded, and so forth.
Explain to people, the difference between ftp, smtp, http, pop3, nntp, imap and so forth. If you're daring, even explain them how to use telnet. Don't go into the very _details_ of the protocols unless they ask, of course. Just explain how things should be done.
If people use instant messenging, explain the difference between IM, ICQ, IRC, and whatever they want to use.
Explain things instead of just choosing the easy way out and adapting to them - except if their way really _is_ better.
That's my opinion. Now flame me for beeing an elitist bastard.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
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.
sig not found
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.
.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!
Lately, the biggest obstacle is not file size, but attachment filters. Almost nobody can recieve an
Thank you, MS Outlook, for these innovations in the use of email.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
I have to agree with previous posts. Email is not a file transfer protocol, it's a mail protocol. It's designed for text. If you want to send files, use a protocol that was designed for it like FTP, HTTP, or DCC file transfer.
If your company is smart they use an instant messenger. If not, I suggest you use one. Using an instant messenger users can send files between each other without going through servers.
- Inventory information
- Competitive Analyses
- Employee Phone Directory
- Customer Lists
- Financial Data (budgets)
One problem, of course, is that many companies want to actually PREVENT easy transfer of some of this data (for example, worried that employees may email confidential data to themselves at home, to use when going to work for another competitor).It is actually pretty rare that regular documents, including source code, exceed a limit like 5MB. However, when documents are created with one tool and saved with another (for example, when a web page containing a table is edited using Microsoft Word), the file size quickly bloats.
My experience has always been that a 5MB limit will need to be "worked around" several times per month by certain employees. For some things, this is easy: instead of sending a single ZIP file containing 20 huge images, break it into 5 files containing 4 each, or send each one individually. If perfect quality isn't an issue (e.g. vacation or baby pictures), run the images through a JPEG reducer.
I actually don't recall EVER sending a file larger than 10MB, and usually I encounter problems with files that are 3-5MB before encoding. I have to consider two issues for larger data transfers: my own bandwidth and the recipient's bandwidth (if the mail would be routed through a non-ISP company mailserver, they might also have bandwidth issues). When sending large batches of images or mega-spreadsheets, it usually makes more sense to send a CD-ROM. (And using CD-ROM also helps because it's harder for most folks to delete or lose than an email attachment.)
Note that all this discussion is about individual email size limits, not mail account limits or quotas. That's a whole other issue. Usually when folks encounter the mailbox quota, it's because their email client is not configured to delete email after downloading it to a PC (a practice that can make sense if you read email from multiple locations, but the art is then setting the right delay before deleting).
I suspect the real issue here is that casual and unnecessary transfer of large files can quickly tie up bandwidth -- especially for branch offices sharing a 128K DSL line, or emails that are sent to 20 or more different recipients. (Recall the Dancing Baby, and this week the various Halloween flashies.)
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
It is very easy for those of us who own / run servers to say "Just put it on a FTP server." It is a lot harder to explain to the average user how to run a server, what servers they have access to (most people don't), what FTP programs are available, and how to explain to their recipients how to download the file.
In short, it is quite the pain in the ass for a 30% file size savings.
Short of an efficient method for transferring files directly between computers (which could be a major security issue when a connection can be initiated while the other person is away from the computer), the file has to reside somewhere to be transferred. If it sits on your FTP server, it takes up 10 megs. If it sits on your e-mail server, it takes up 13 megs. Either way, I'm not particularly impressed. Those with dial-up connections shouldn't be downloading those files, but a halfway decent connection shouldn't have a major problem.
Yes, many clients don't like downloads above a certain size. This is a shortcoming of the clients that should be overcome by their programmers, not by a rejection of those mails system wide.
Really, the hassle of putting files / documents up on an FTP server to the average user is quite, quite large compared to the simplicity of clicking the "Attach" button. Perhaps this can lead to abuses, with forwards and mails going to 20 people. These abuses should be met with auto-responding messages encouraging them to watch company resources, rather than outright rejection.
Sometimes you just need to send a 20 meg file. Who is this network working for again?
-Chris
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
If your infrastructure can't handle the occasional 40MB mail, fix it. Disk space is dirt cheap, so is network infrastructure. If you use imap (which is a pretty good idea), modem users do not have to download larger messages. If your mailserver is clever enough to not replicate attachments for each addressee, performance will be acceptable.
Users will just get annoyed if they can't send their powerpoint docs to other users. Most employees cost more per day then they'll use in storage space per year so don't impose restrictions with respect to file storage. 5MB is nothing today.
Jilles
We have about 180 users and our standard Exchange mailbox size limit is 90MB (soft) and 100MB (hard). Some higher ups get double that, and some really high ups and people that have jobs where they need to keep a lot of old email have none.
I couldn't imagine a 5MB limit. That's fine in a world of text only email, but not today. Too many Word/Excel/Project docs floating around. I do not limit mail attachment sizes because it has not been abused, yet.
Call me old-fashioned, but I consider 5MB to be plenty for a single e-mail message size. While there are good exceptions to this rule, I'll list the arguments in favor of a "small" max message size:
Again, some of these points means that you need to make a public webserver available for users to post things on. I would recommend a CGI that posts content and returns a key to that content (MD5 hash, perhaps). Only with the key can the user get the content. That way, your staff can upload anything of any size, and then e-mail the MD5 key to other people to let them download it. Reasonable security and relative ease. You could even have users include an expiration date so you can auto-delete stale uploads.
I always set up the "size" field, in real numbers (do you really expect a user to know what 10MB is?) so that they eventually learn about email size.
I have no quotas on email, except for the fact that we only have 2,678,837,248 bytes free on our server at this point in time.
--Mike--
Computers - Tools to let people get their jobs done.
When you explain to some of these poeple that hey, you just can't put 200GB on a 120GB disk along with your operating environment and other company file storage, they blink.
Customers are not always right - customers in many cases need to be educated so that they may understand how "this e-mail stuff" works.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
I work in construction. Email is essential to transfer in a way the users already know how to use files, drawings, and other documents. Disk is cheap. Bandwidth is a utility cost. ftp has lost the widespread adoption battle because it's got some security issues, and frankly it's a technology that just gets in the way. The function of IT is to provide a service that people need. If you want to impose limits on what users can do, expect to be replaced sometime by a sysadmin that doesn't have those urges.
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
It's nice for all of us as geeks to say "make the users use FTP" (though frankly, I'd prefer scp or nothing), but it isn't practical.
I work in a not-for-profit that publishes a weekly journal, so we are both "an academic environment" (we operate somewhat like a unversity), and a good-size for-profit company. To that end, the requirements of our user community are very different.
We used to traffic a lot of paper and film via FedEx and couriers, and moving all that processing to electronic mediums saves us over $300k/year. I should know, I had a big hand in implementing our digital workflow (why do you think they bought me an Aibo?). Our technology spending isn't any more than it was when everything was paper based, but our saving have been huge.
We use Groupwise for corporate email, and the post offices live on a SAN virtual disk. Our SAN has over 2TB in storage, Netware lets you concat volume segments dynamically, and Groupwise only stores a message once in the database and passes pointers to each internal recipient. So storing large attachments is very efficient, and enlarging the post offices is trivial. Our SAN is only 33% populated, and smaller drives (75GB) can be replaced on the fly with larger drives (180GB) and the array will resize and rebuild itself hot.
So we have no inbound or outbound attachment limit, though we do keep an eye on things to make sure people don't go nuts. We just upgraded our servers last weekend after 2 1/2 years in service, despite our post offices growing by a factor of 10. Having administered Exchange, Notes, and Groupwise, I think we've got the best of the three groupware packages, and our users are happy enough (they would be happy, but who is every happy at the phone company because they have a dial tone?)
In three years, we did turn up our bandwidth from (2) T-1s to a 6mbt fractional DS-3, but email only accounts for a small portion of that traffic (we host half a dozen more websites than we used to).
The largest attachment I ever emailed was probably 100MB, and I honestly find 5MB limits to be draconian. We have an FTP drop, but our vendors won't use it. Last month, I had to email a vendor a dat tape with 13MB of data because they have a 5MB attachment limit. Sick.
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
- 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?yEnc has shown widespread acceptance in Usenet, I'd like to see it used as the de-facto format for SMTP mail. Electronic mail's "push" nature makes it extremely useful where FTP/HTTP is not (although IRC DCC is) and I'd enjoy having the pleasure of subscribing to mailing lists which send out multimedia or other forms of large content and having it delivered, just like postal mail, right to my desktop or a nearby ISP mail server. Who is with me?
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