[AusNOG] Current "Best Practice" WRT email size

[Shane Short]

 > We have an in-house (but publicly visible) file transfer service (a 
corporate drop-box, if you will).  Because apparently 
uploading/downloading from this service uses significantly less 
bandwidth than it would use to transfer the file via email, and the disk 
space on the server dedicated to this
service is much cheaper than mail server storage.  And maintaining two 
systems is easier and cheaper than maintaining one.

Go have a look at your netflow logs and tell me how much bandwidth SMTP 
traffic *actually* accounts for. I would wager it's probably less than 
your windows update traffic :).
It's also worth noting that an envelope size limit here doesn't prevent 
bandwidth waste from the customer end anyway, they send you the entire 
envelope BEFORE you can tell them it's too big and tell them to sod off. 
Repeat this 5 times while the customer tries to rezip/recompress or just 
sends it again because they don't understand your bounce message.


Robert Hudson wrote:
>
>
> On 26 November 2015 at 13:25, Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org 
> <mailto:newton at atdot.dotat.org>> wrote:
>
>     On Nov 26, 2015, at 1:10 PM, Ross Wheeler <ausnog at rossw.net
>     <mailto:ausnog at rossw.net>> wrote:
>     > 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?
>
>     It goes to where the users demand.
>
>     There’s no specific reason why email can’t be a defacto
>     file-transport-and-archive system of choice. It’s carried by TCP
>     just like every other file-transport-and-archive system, and
>     everyone has clients for it. If the users want to use it for that,
>     what’s wrong with it?
>
>     > 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”.
>
>     Go back to the question, “Why does the limit exist?”
>
>     SMTP servers used to have the limit because large files took a
>     long time to send, bandwidth was expensive, storage space also
>     cost a lot of money, and if a message was too big the client would
>     probably crap its dacks when it tried to receive it anyway.
>
>     Even a decade ago, 10 Mbyte limits were the norm. You’re currently
>     happy with 16 Mbytes, even though all the resources which were
>     extant when the limits were first envisaged have scaled by, what,
>     a factor of 1000 in the right direction?
>
>     You currently have a limit which prevents your users from sending
>     a RAW format image off their digital camera as a file attachment.
>     That seems unusually small to me.
>
>     Is there any specific reason why you couldn’t update it to 1
>     Gbyte?  If you had allowed it to grow at the same rate as
>     bandwidth and Mbytes-per-dollar storage costs over the last ten
>     years it’d probably be closer to 10 Gbytes by now, so setting it
>     to 1 Gbyte is an order of magnitude less than organic growth.
>
>
> We have an in-house (but publicly visible) file transfer service (a 
> corporate drop-box, if you will).  Because apparently 
> uploading/downloading from this service uses significantly less 
> bandwidth than it would use to transfer the file via email, and the 
> disk space on the server dedicated to this service is much cheaper 
> than mail server storage.  And maintaining two systems is easier and 
> cheaper than maintaining one.
>
> Yes, there may be sarcasm in that second sentence.  And the third 
> one.  Alas, I don't make the decision in this instance.
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> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
> http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog

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