Large emails
From Peyton Hall Documentation
This article hopes to convey some information about large emails, such as what they are and what you need to do if you think you need to send or receive one.
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Definition
There is no true definition of "large" when speaking about emails. To some people, an email that is a couple hundred MB is no big deal, but to others anything over a few hundred KB is too big. Ones perception of what is "too large" is changed by the bandwidth and speed of your network connection, the speed of your email client, and the space you have available on the mail server and possibly on your local computer.
What do we call large in Peyton Hall?
For our purposes, an email which is larger than 25MB is too big. Please keep in mind that email is plain-text only, not binary. To accommodate binary attachments, emails are encoded with MIME which tends to make them slightly larger than they were when they started. So while you may have an attachment that is 20MB, when encoded it may end up creating an email that is too big to be sent.
How do I know if my mail was too big?
Your message will be rejected by the mail server. This isn't a soft rejection - the mail is considered undeliverable, so a notification will be sent back to the sender by their client (if they connected directly) or their mail server (if they connected through another mail server) that the message could not be delivered. The actual error will look like this:
552 5.3.4 Message size exceeds fixed limit
How to handle large mails
I need to send out something big!
More likely than not, you don't really need to send it through email. Instead, you could put it in your FTP space, or on your web page (even using a password to protect it if necessary). At the very least, think of your recipient - they may be reading their email on a mobile device, or using a slow wireless link, and may be forced to download the entire message even if they don't have intentions of acting on it at that moment. If instead you email them a link to the file which they can get at their leisure, then when they're back in the office with a faster connection they can load up the file.
Someone needs to send a large mail to me!
If they cannot put the file on an anonymous FTP repository under their control, or on their own webpage, then they can always upload it to your incoming FTP directory here. In this way, they upload the file and just tell you in email where to get it; you can then go get it when it's convenient for you.
