7 ms·

> Have you ever tried to attach a file to an email only to find out it's too large to send? Yeah! Some jerk who runs my MTA set the size of acceptable attachme

by munin 14y ago

> Have you ever tried to attach a file to an email only to find out it's too large to send? Yeah! Some jerk who runs my MTA set the size of acceptable attachments really low! I wonder who did that... $ host -t mx mydomain.com mydomain.com mail is handled by 0 aspmx.l.google.com. Oh... I see.

notatoad 14y ago
Attachment size limits aren't there just to fuck with you. Sending large files around between web clients is okay, but if you send a large file to an outlook user they're going to have to sit there waiting for it to download before the rest of their email comes in. And then it's going to make their PST file exceed the maximum PST file size, which in a poorly managed system (i.e. most personal computers) is going to cause data loss. Also, my parents used to use an ISP-provided email address, and it would silently drop any messages that included a file that exceeded their maximum attachment size. So any time i tried to send them photos, they'd never get the email. Limiting attachments to a fairly small size is just being a good citizen of the email network.
- suprfsat 14y ago
  And the users get really mad at Exchange and Outlook, and they complain to their administrators, and they switch to Google Apps.
- munin 14y ago
  Oh sure. However, it also puts a lot of load / strain on servers that Google doesn't want to run (SMTP, IMAP, etc). The way the post is written makes it sound like Google has figured out how to tame some natural force to allow us to have big e-mail attachments, while all along the limit was set by Google itself. I really don't think that Google cares about Outlook users (why should they). Somewhat unrelated, I think that Google is beginning to try and pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP. I've long used Mail.app, mutt, or Thunderbird to use mail hosted by Google, almost entirely because the GMail client doesn't support any kind of message encryption or authentication. Recently, I have been receiving a lot of "quota exceeded" messages during routine interactions with the IMAP servers. I suspect that Google is in the process of gradually lowering the allowed quotas for IMAP usage in an attempt to get people to use the web UI, Android, or cros ...
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    How often are you syncing? I use offlineimap and haven't noticed any issues. If that's the case, though, seems like I should start looking into alternative email providers....
  - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
    > I really don't think that Google cares about Outlook users (why should they). Because they want their users to be able to communicate with Outlook users? You are talking nonsense, they obviously need to play nice with other email hostings/clients; and with this new way of sending files it let their users know that they are two different ways of sending data; that is not really an email attachment but a link to your file in the cloud; a distinction that many times matter. And they can't give the amount space they give in Drive to every gmail account; why would they do that? Better to be a different service that only the people interested in that kind of big cloud storage will take.
  - hurstdog 14y ago
    I'm not sure why you're getting those quota errors, but I can assure you that we're not trying to pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP. If you post on the forums, some user support folks should be able to help you out and escalate to engineering if they find you're hitting a bug. Sorry for the issues you're seeing.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  Thanks for explaining this, it sounds obvious now but I never understood why attachment size was limited.
  - kamjam 14y ago
    I think attachment sizes were also limited because back in the day, you know when Internet connectivity was a series of beeps and clicks, people used to surf the internet on these shitty little things called modems that ran at 33.6 and 56 kbps. Forget the 10 meg limits imposed in those days, it would probably have taken an hour to download that single message! A lot of the hang up may have remained from that. I remember the days when it would take 20 minutes to download an mp3 only for it to drop out in the final minute. Grrr! Add to that what lloeki said, it's probably one of the most important reason. I becomes very easy to take down several servers at the same time!
- lloeki 14y ago
  > Attachment size limits aren't there just to fuck with you. Although bandwidth and storage have greatly been raised, the scaling problem remains: send a single email with the usual limit of 10MB to 20 recipients, and it will balloon to 200MB total at some point, possibly multiple times even. Scale this up, and you've quickly got a problem. What's more, either you put on limits or become a target for volume-filling DoS, and whatever limit you put on will be used and abused (ever seen those professional PPTs filled with ridiculously sized, uncompressed BMPs?). So when sending big files email basically becomes a form of push signalling mechanism, where voluminous resources can be pulled on demand. Maybe a standardization of this process is in order instead of everyone coming up with its body-embedded HTML presentation mimicking regular file attachments? Something like a multipart message with mime type application/email-attachment-uri, which would make it nice to text-only modes. BTW this really looks like what's currently implemented in Sparrow with CloudApp or Dropbox.
  - afhof 14y ago
    Also don't forget that attachments are usually base64 encoded which increases the size by 33%.

by munin 14y ago

notatoad 14y ago

Attachment size limits aren't there just to fuck with you. Sending large files around between web clients is okay, but if you send a large file to an outlook user they're going to have to sit there waiting for it to download before the rest of their email comes in. And then it's going to make their PST file exceed the maximum PST file size, which in a poorly managed system (i.e. most personal computers) is going to cause data loss. Also, my parents used to use an ISP-provided email address, and it would silently drop any messages that included a file that exceeded their maximum attachment size. So any time i tried to send them photos, they'd never get the email. Limiting attachments to a fairly small size is just being a good citizen of the email network.

suprfsat 14y ago
And the users get really mad at Exchange and Outlook, and they complain to their administrators, and they switch to Google Apps.
munin 14y ago
Oh sure. However, it also puts a lot of load / strain on servers that Google doesn't want to run (SMTP, IMAP, etc). The way the post is written makes it sound like Google has figured out how to tame some natural force to allow us to have big e-mail attachments, while all along the limit was set by Google itself. I really don't think that Google cares about Outlook users (why should they). Somewhat unrelated, I think that Google is beginning to try and pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP. I've long used Mail.app, mutt, or Thunderbird to use mail hosted by Google, almost entirely because the GMail client doesn't support any kind of message encryption or authentication. Recently, I have been receiving a lot of "quota exceeded" messages during routine interactions with the IMAP servers. I suspect that Google is in the process of gradually lowering the allowed quotas for IMAP usage in an attempt to get people to use the web UI, Android, or cros ...
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  How often are you syncing? I use offlineimap and haven't noticed any issues. If that's the case, though, seems like I should start looking into alternative email providers....
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
  > I really don't think that Google cares about Outlook users (why should they). Because they want their users to be able to communicate with Outlook users? You are talking nonsense, they obviously need to play nice with other email hostings/clients; and with this new way of sending files it let their users know that they are two different ways of sending data; that is not really an email attachment but a link to your file in the cloud; a distinction that many times matter. And they can't give the amount space they give in Drive to every gmail account; why would they do that? Better to be a different service that only the people interested in that kind of big cloud storage will take.
- hurstdog 14y ago
  I'm not sure why you're getting those quota errors, but I can assure you that we're not trying to pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP. If you post on the forums, some user support folks should be able to help you out and escalate to engineering if they find you're hitting a bug. Sorry for the issues you're seeing.
k-mcgrady 14y ago
Thanks for explaining this, it sounds obvious now but I never understood why attachment size was limited.
- kamjam 14y ago
  I think attachment sizes were also limited because back in the day, you know when Internet connectivity was a series of beeps and clicks, people used to surf the internet on these shitty little things called modems that ran at 33.6 and 56 kbps. Forget the 10 meg limits imposed in those days, it would probably have taken an hour to download that single message! A lot of the hang up may have remained from that. I remember the days when it would take 20 minutes to download an mp3 only for it to drop out in the final minute. Grrr! Add to that what lloeki said, it's probably one of the most important reason. I becomes very easy to take down several servers at the same time!
lloeki 14y ago
> Attachment size limits aren't there just to fuck with you. Although bandwidth and storage have greatly been raised, the scaling problem remains: send a single email with the usual limit of 10MB to 20 recipients, and it will balloon to 200MB total at some point, possibly multiple times even. Scale this up, and you've quickly got a problem. What's more, either you put on limits or become a target for volume-filling DoS, and whatever limit you put on will be used and abused (ever seen those professional PPTs filled with ridiculously sized, uncompressed BMPs?). So when sending big files email basically becomes a form of push signalling mechanism, where voluminous resources can be pulled on demand. Maybe a standardization of this process is in order instead of everyone coming up with its body-embedded HTML presentation mimicking regular file attachments? Something like a multipart message with mime type application/email-attachment-uri, which would make it nice to text-only modes. BTW this really looks like what's currently implemented in Sparrow with CloudApp or Dropbox.
- afhof 14y ago
  Also don't forget that attachments are usually base64 encoded which increases the size by 33%.