Just a reminder that many mail servers will reject emails over a set size, often 2-2.5MB. So while your local server may happily accept the big email another one between you and the intended recipient(s) may well decline. Complicating this is that when binary attachments are encoded to text for transmission (a historical artifact) they can grow in size up to ~30%. Thus your 1.5MB attachment could well get rejected by other server with 2MB limits.
Thus a 2MB limit is a "good thing" and exceptions to it should be considered carefully and the possible repercussions explained to your user population. My own policy would be to keep the limit and for outside destinations offer to place large files in a webserver with an encoded URL. For internal messages I'd show the person how do the same with shared iBays and password-protected files.
However rarely have I seen an over-sized email that was truly important, couldn't be trivially be brought under 2MB by with some compression, or by dividing multiple files into smaller batches. For those that still absolutely *had* to be some enormous length few ever made it to their recipient or were appreciated when they filled up someone's Inbox.
6 Replies
561 Views