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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!
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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."
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.
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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.
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."
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- 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?