[AusNOG] [SAGE-AU Discuss] [RESULTS] Straw poll: what is your email message size limit?

[Paul Gear]

On 03/26/2013 10:57 AM, Paul Gear wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We have high-up non-technical people in our organisation asking for a 
> higher email message size limit.  (Ours is set to 10 Mb, which is the 
> most common limit i've seen.)  We've explained that increasing our 
> email system's limit won't solve the problem if every other mail 
> system has a similar limit, but the message isn't getting through.
>
> If you have the information at your disposal, would you kindly reply 
> off-list with your current email size limit?  I'm happy to summarise 
> the results for the list.
>
> If there's a better place to ask this, or if someone has already 
> collated this data for most Australian ISPs, please feel free to point 
> me to the right place.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Paul
>

Hi everyone,

I've been overwhelmed at the speed, quantity, and quality of your 
responses.  Thanks very much.

A soft summary: it seems that those of us on 10 MB or less are behind 
the times, mostly thanks to gmail.

Now for the hard numbers:

  * Total responses: 45
  * Numerically quantifiable responses (excludes ambiguous answers, and
    two with no limits on their email system): 41
  * Mean: 29.098 [1]
  * Median: 25 [2]
  * Mode: 20 [3]
  * Standard deviation: 20.258 (Do statisticians call this a "WTH
    distribution"?  It's clearly not a normal one.)

There were some really interesting comments along with the numbers, 
particularly in the AusNOG thread:

  * http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/2013-March/017617.html

I'd also like to publish some of the comments i received off-list. 
Because i said i would summarise the results for the lists, i'm going to 
assume that anyone who emailed me directly will be happy to be quoted 
anonymously.  However, if any of you feel strongly that you don't want 
your comments to be used, please reply to the message you sent me 
stating so.  I'll give it 24 hours before i throw up the comments on 
Google Drive.  Once i've published this, i'll keep it up to date with 
any updated responses i receive.

Thanks again for the responses - i count it a privilege to be part of 
such helpful and expert online communities!

Regards,
Paul

Notes for those who didn't study statistics, forgot it, or failed the 
course at uni due to apathy (i'm in the last group):
[1] Mean == average (pretty much). 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_mean
[2] Median == middle result when arranged in numeric order. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median
[3] Mode == most common answer. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_%28statistics%29


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