[AusNOG] Current "Best Practice" WRT email size

[Grahame Lynch]

At CommsDay we send attached PDFs to thousands of corporate customers daily.

There are a few who balk at anything over 500k. We would never send an
attachment over 1 Mb in a mass format. We have to work with the lowest
common denominator as our emails are for "paid subscriptions"

It's not just about what is technically possible but also what "looks like"
spam. A bunch of emails with big attachments hitting the same domain at
once looks like spam under such policies.

On 26 November 2015 at 09:10, Ross Wheeler <ausnog at rossw.net> 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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