bob04222 |
I’m not sure it’s a question of imposing limits as much as it’s a question of providing a service. If you can be reasonably sure the large attachments will help people do thier jobs more efficiently (as opposed to sending Aunt Martha pictures of their recent vacations), then you should make sure you (and they) have the resources to handle the increased volume and sizes of mail. It’s really a management decision as opposed to an IT decision.
cesareDH |
There are a number of ways to transfer large files (50MB) free over the Internet without you setting your limits that high, tho I do feel 10MB is reasonable from both standpoints.
csmmis |
I work in an industry where .pdf documents are often required, and where the senders are often very UNsavvy about formats, file sizes, or anything else remotely “technical.” As a result, we frequently receive documents which were scanned into .pdf format (as images, not OCR’d) and are quite large. We’ve bumped our limit to 10 MB. That has eliminated most of our problems.
stevesz |
We do have a lot of photos and artwork that comes into our business. We have set the attachment limit at 15 MB. Anything that is larger needs to be FTP’d to our FTP site. No ifs ands or buts about it. If it is going out, it needs to be FTP’d to their site, or placed on the X-drive service used by one of the company’s we do a lot of business with.
Zipping a file, as someone else mentioned earlier is not the glorius option it used to be. Many places now block ZIP files because of the number of virus that use the ZIP format to try to elude capture. PDF files may be an option for those who need to send large documents. You can get some pretty high rates of compression with Acrobat (though not many people realize that increasing the compression is an option). However, if they need to be edited by the recieving party, it adds a layer of complexity to the process.
Steve
nileshroy |
We have a lot of media files flowing in & out. Though my network user base is not as big as yours. What I have done is as follows:
Create User groups or Units
Put Users in various Units
Define limits based on Groups.
In my case,
Default every users get 10 MB.
Managers get 25 MB.
HeavyDuty users get 50 MB.
See if ths works for you.
Regards,
Nilesh Roy.
Zaphod |
My thanks to all those who took the trouble to share their thoughts. Regarding the comment from mgregory:
“automated ftp upload page”: This is indeed a useful technique for SENDING large messages; it’s less generally applicable for inbound messages, since its workabilitiy depends on the sophistication of the sender — we as receiver have no control over its use.
Thanks again.
solutions1 |
One further point - take compliance “friendliness” into account. For many companies and institutions, being able to archive, index and search outgoing communications is important from regulatory/legal. It is vastly easier to do so if communications “packages” (typically text email plus attachments) travel together. A generous email (both ways)limit avoids the compliance complications created if users split communications between email and ftp or worse still between voice/Instant messaging and <a href="http://ftp." rel="nofollow">ftp.</a>
TheVyrys |
“Key user groups”
Depending on your set up, one possibility would be to create a common/shared mailbox with a large limit, allow the key users access and have any big files sent to that address only. They then could access the shared mailbox, save the file to disk and delete the message.
This would allow administration or supervision of the files to a degree and keep the users personal mailboxes under a tighter limit.
One immediate problem would be privacy, but I understood that the type of document they downloaded was probably regulatory, indicating ‘regulations’ or such. These are probably shared among the groups anyway if that is the case.
If there are only a limited number of these key user groups this may work, if there are many, it could be an administrative nightmare, so this is a “maybe” solution, again, depending on your situation. It has worked for me in the past.
good luck.
everybody loves you when they need you
Juswannano |
As a consultant, I can share that most sites I have worked with are larger and impose limits of between 8MB and 12MB. Over the past few years, as the cost of drive space has gone down, messaging databases have grown considerably. While I have seen a few sites with 50MB + email size limititations, this is quite rare. Most organizations will not accept these sizes of messages, causing the senders mail system to waste twice as many resources on these messages for naught. If you really need to move large files via email, and you don’t want to impose FTP on your users, there are products that can tie into your SMTP mail system to automatically and securely redirect any message that meets certain criteria, such as size or message content sensitivity, over to an alternate delivery route such as HTTPS. These tools are being used to help organizations comply with multiple federal privacy regulations.
Run a web search for keywords: Secure + Redirect + Email to learn more about these…
Compliance, Laws, Regulations, standards, E-business, CRM, Partner facing, Exchange, Networking, Bandwidth, Performance management
Encouraged by the helpful responses to the recent question about mailbox quotas I?d like to pose a related question: What size limits to you impose on inbound/outbound SMTP messages?
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