[AusNOG] Current "Best Practice" WRT email size

[Joseph Goldman]

I dont know if you'll find any 'best practices' or consensus on this matter.

I personally hate it worse when the far end servers don't generate a 
bounce back for the EU to explain why, so in some cases I have set some 
of my own servers to 10MB, as I know my server will generate the bounce 
back for the user and make it clear.

Other than that, I'd be happy and comfortable with 30-50MB, 50 being the 
max. I am running a service provider mail server though not a corporate 
one so, use case is different, and I dont want people holding gigabytes 
of mail on my server (clean em up or POP em off).


On 26/11/15 13:10, Ross Wheeler wrote:
>
> On Thu, 26 Nov 2015, David Hughes wrote:
>
>> Please pull it back to something with operational relevance.
>
> Not sure if this is "operationally relevant" or not, I hope so...
> I've spent several hours over the last few days trying to find some 
> "authorative", current, relevant guide as to what is considered "best 
> current practice" guidelines for email attachment sizes.
>
> I know email is being constantly asked to take ongoing abuse and to 
> become the defacto file-transport-and-archive system of choice, 
> particularly by the technically incompetent, but how far does it go?
>
> Case in point: earlier this week, I had a call from a customer 
> "needing" me to increase our mail size. (I thought we were 'reasonably 
> generous' in current global terms, at 16MB per message). I asked what 
> he considered it needed to be, his response was that "right now" he 
> needs 50-60MB, but that he thought it shouldn't have any limit - but 
> if it had to, that 300-500MB per message would "probably do for now".
>
> Of course, he doesn't care about any operational issues, about the 
> fact that even if I did increase my server to that size, "most of the 
> rest of the world" wouldn't accept his mail and it'd bounce back 
> anyway. Turns out, he's "mostly" expecting to receive these files... 
> and the "undeliverable" mail he was complaining about didn't even 
> leave the other parties ISP! (Try explaining THAT to someone who 
> doesn't want to know!)
>
> Lots of places still seem to have a 10MB limit, some smaller, some 
> greater, but generally still in the low-tens-of-megabytes range.
>
> Would love to find a reference - partly to keep myself up to date with 
> what everyone else is doing, and partly to be able to point this guy 
> to so it's not just "Ross saying no".
>
> Thanks,
> R.
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