e-mail size limit

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Reon

69 posts

Master Geek
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#11326 16-Jan-2007 11:07

Hi

A question for the Network/System administrators out there, what do you consider is a good e-mail size limit for an e-mail server these days?

Cheers
Reon

johnr

19282 posts

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#58039 16-Jan-2007 11:19

I take it you mean size limit per Email receviced

10 meg

kwaan

70 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#58044 16-Jan-2007 11:32

its 10mb.....though i wish if someone like gmail would offer 1.5GBlimit for attachments.....all the 2.85GB limit on my gmail account is sitting there and not being used.....

Fraktul

836 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#58244 18-Jan-2007 11:37

10MB is the unwritten law.

Email was not designed as a file transfer system for large files.

exportgoldman

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#58256 18-Jan-2007 13:38

Also remember that when attaching binary files (i.e. and nearly any file) to a e-mail, it gets stored in MIME format which increases the actual size by 20%-30% so a 7MB File will just make it through to a 10MB limited gateway.

We also use 10MB for our internal and our client's mail systems. Seems to be a universal size.

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juha

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#58273 18-Jan-2007 15:25

There's no specific size, but as Exportgoldman points out, email is sent as text-only. That means binaries are converted to text, which in turn bloats the size of attachments by roughly a third.

Ten MB is probably a good compromise, depending on your storage and link capacity, but it's one of those fine lines a mail admin has to walk... it's very hard to explain to non-techie users who don't look at file sizes that they can only send a 10 or 20MB file. Also, if you set the limit too small, the messages are bounced back, since many MTAs ignore the SIZE directive in SMTP. The problem here is that users' MUAs don't tell them that "ahem, that attachment is much too big"...

Juha