[AusNOG] Current "Best Practice" WRT email size

[paul+ausnog at oxygennetworks.com.au]

We use 20M as the max size through our network and very rarely do we see an issue, we only have business customers.

My position if I were you would be to explain to the customer that they can get a free account on dropbox, and that's what it's for.

Regards
Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: AusNOG [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Ross Wheeler
Sent: Thursday, 26 November 2015 1:10 PM
To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
Subject: [AusNOG] Current "Best Practice" WRT email size


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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