Austin Lane

One issue that seems to be at the top of everyone’s minds these days is email attachment limits. Users seemingly want to be able to send email attachments of unlimited size, including several gigabytes. There are several reasons that most email services limit the size of email messages to around 10 megabytes in size. These reasons include:

• Many email programs have a hard time with very large email messages or very large mailbox files. Even with the 10 megabyte size limitation in place, users over dialup or slower broadband connections have problems checking their email. If this limit were increased, this issue would be worsened.
• Processing large email messages puts more strain on email servers, especially if they are mailed to a large number of people at once. The latter situation can bog down the entire mail system, negatively affecting everyone whose mail is sent to email systems. A large file sent to hundreds or thousands of users can cause serious performance problems for email systems. If a user sends a 6MB file to 1,200 people, the email server must process 7,200MB (or 7GB) of data at once for only this one outgoing email message.
• Some email services enforce mailbox size limits. If this limit was set at 1GB for each user, and the maximum attachment size were increased to 50MB, then, assuming that the email mailbox is currently empty, only twenty of these messages would keep a user from receiving any more email.

We understand that email is a convenient way to transfer files between people, but we have to place restrictions on it to maintain an adequate level of service for everyone. Austin Lane’s main email servers limit the size of files that can be attached to email messages to 10MB. This applies to both outgoing and incoming messages. There is no option to turn off this limitation. There are, however, other ways to transfer large files between two offices. These include, but are not limited to:

• United States Postal Service — You can save the information to a CD or other removable media and mail it to your intended recipient.
• FedEx, UPS, DHL — This is the same as the USPS, but delivery times are much quicker.
• Website — You could post your file to a website, and then email the recipient and tell them to go to this website and retreive the file. There are several services on the internet that provide this functionality, many of which are free (just Google for “free web space”).
• FTP — This is the preferred method of transferring large files over the internet. The sender would upload the file to a FTP server, and then notify the recipient that the file is ready to access. The recipient then logs on to the FTP server, and is able to download the file from the FTP server. The recipient is required to have a login to the FTP server to access the files.  There are several free FTP services available on the internet, which you can find by Googling “free ftp space”.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Austin Lane, Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.