[AusNOG] Current "Best Practice" WRT email size

[Shane Short]

E-mail attachment limits are largely a holdover from the dialup era 
where this kind of thing mattered. I don't see any real tangible reason 
to artificially limit the size of an e-mail attachment. If you think 
there is, I'd be interested to hear what it is. FWIW, at $dayjob we 
haven't had attachment limits in place for nearly 10 years now and we've 
never had an issue. Once in a blue moon we get someone who does get a 
remote bounce back, but in that instance it's very clear to explain to 
them that the other end has decided the e-mail is too big, and we can 
clearly show that we're not the issue.

Saying that e-mail isn't fit-for-purpose to send attachments is silly 
imho. Sure, MIME-encoding wastes space, but in this day and age, who 
cares? It's convenient, people know how to use it-- and you're not 
introducing another piece of software/online subscription to handle what 
is effectively a very simple thing. The only problem I can see with it 
(ironically) is that people who set attachment limits make it more 
difficult for everyone else. :)

As always, YMMV :)

-Shane

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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