Boo said:
How do you expand the size capability of email attachments for sending? I
can receive huge attachments, but I can't forward or send them??? For
example, a slide show was received, but when I tried to send or forward it,
it just keeps trying & tells me it's 'enormous' & >5mb. HELP!!!
Your UNIDENTIFIED e-mail provider obviously have different
anti-spam/abuse quotas for received versus sent e-mails when using their
service. Looks like they have a 5MB maximum size quota for your account
with them. Also remember that attaching a 5MB file doesn't increase the
size of your e-mail by 5MB. All e-mail gets sent as plain text. ALL of
it! HTML is text. RTF is text with a .dat attachment. Attachments are
encoded into long text strings inside of MIME sections inside the body
of the e-mail. That encoding into a text string bloats the size of the
attachment by 137%, or often much more. Save a draft of your e-mail,
look in the Drafts folder, and check the Size column to see what is the
actual size of the e-mail that you will send.
Outlook doesn't care about the size of your outbound e-mails. There is
no such "enormous" error issued by Outlook. That error would be issued
by your unidentified e-mail provider's mail server which then Outlook
shows to you. Talk to your unidentified e-mail provider or read their
web help pages to find out what are their anti-spam or anti-abuse quotas
for the account type you have with them. Personal accounts will have
smaller quotas than business accounts, and some e-mail providers,
especially the free services, have smaller quotas than other paid or
free e-mail providers.
E-mail is NOT a reliable file transfer mechanism. It wasn't intended or
designed for that. It was designed to send lots of small messages.
There is no CRC check on the file to ensure integrity. There is no
resume to re-retrieve the file if the e-mail download fails. There is
no guarantee the e-mail will arrive uncorrupted. Large e-mails can
generate timeouts and retries due to the delay when anti-virus programs
interrogate their content.
Do not use e-mail to send large files. It is rude to the recipient.
Not every recipient might want your large file. Not every recipient has
high-speed broadband Internet access. Many users still use slow dial-up
access, especially if all they do is e-mail. You waste your e-mail
provider's disk space and their bandwidth to send a huge e-mail. You
waste the e-mail provider's disk space and bandwidth at the recipient's
end. You eat up the disk quota for the recipient's mailbox (which could
render it unusable so further e-mails get rejected due to a full
mailbox). You irritate users still on dial-up that have to wait eons
waiting to download your huge e-mail. Some users have usage quotas
(i.e., so many bytes/month) and you waste it with a file that they may
not want. Don't be insensitive to recipients of your e-mails. Take the
large file out of the e-mail.
Save the file in online storage and send the recipient a URL link to the
file. Your e-mail remains small. It is more likely to arrive. It is
more likely to be seen. The recipient can decide whether or not and
when to download your large file. Be polite by sending small e-mails.
Your ISP probably allows many gigabytes of online storage for personal
web pages. Upload your file there and provide a URL link to it. Other
methods (of using online storage), all free, are:
http://www.adrive.com/ (50GB max quota, 2GB max file size)
http://www.driveway.com/ (500MB max file size)
http://www.filefactory.com/ (300MB max file size)
http://www.megashares.com/ (10GB max file size)
http://www.sendspace.com/ (300MB max file size)
http://www.spread-it.com/ (500MB max file size)
http://www.transferbigfiles.com/ (1GB max file size)
http://zshare.net/ (500MB max file size)
http://www.zupload.com/ (500MB max file size)
If it is sensitive content and when storing it online in a public
storage area or to guard it against whomever operates the online storage
service, remember to encrypt it.
