Understanding email-attachment limitations

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Best Practices

Understanding email-attachment limitations

By Tracey Capen Reports on the coming death of email have been floated for some years. But email is still the most common system for sharing documents over the Internet. Here are tips and information on the limitations of email attachments.

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The full text of this column is posted at windowssecrets.com/best-practices/understanding-email-attachment-limitations/ (opens in a new window/tab).

Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.

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Don’t forget that there are free services that automatically handle files of any size by uploading them and sending the recipient an email with the link and your message, all in one step online. I’ve sent files of several GB (yes, that’s Gigabytes) this way. Here are two free services:
https://www.sendthisfile.com/
https://wetransfer.com/

Stu

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I was surprised to see the suggestion to zip attachments. At the small business I work for we stopped automatically doing this awhile ago because of the number of recipients whose corporation blocked zip attachments. In fact, I recently started blocking zip attachments from coming in due to the number arriving in suspicious messages.

BrianG

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I, too, have used the following websites to send large files:
Civil Netizen
Driveway
Dropload
FileFactory
MailBigFile
SendThisFile
YouSendIt

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Great article identifying the max attachment size of the popular email services, but there is an issue that was not addressed. I may be able to send a 25 MB attachment from my Gmail account, but the recipient’s email service or their ISP may only accept a 5 MB attachment. Check with your recipient that they will be able to receive an email with a huge attachment.

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Hi Tracey:

Thank you for the article on “Understanding Email-Attachment Limitations”. Are you by any chance considering a follow on article on “Email-Addressee Limitations”?

Stan

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Why would anyone want to send a 25 MB picture by email? Sorry you didn’t look at Eudora 7, still the best email client!

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You can just put the attachment on your Google Drive/One Drive and sned the link yourself.

Sending large email attachments can be VERY slow because most people have relatively slow upload speeds compared to download and your email provider is probably even slower than your maximum. For instance, I have 75Mbs download speed but only 6Mbs upload speed.

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