Area: Electronic Mail
Topic: Message Size

Background
A number of customers have asked us why messages are sometimes bounced before they reach the intended recipient.

The answers to this are of course many and varied but the main one we are now seeing relates to the size of the message.

Each end user of Internet Mail connects to an Internet Service Provider. Some of these ISPs limit the transfer of electronic mail either by size, by quantity or by sending address.

For example, if you sent an electronic mail message (and an attached 12Mb file) to an associate at Telstra Big Pond from the TECH 2U system the message would be blocked by Telstra as being over their designated 10Mb limits. If the message was under 10Mb, lets say 9Mb, but your associate has 6Mb of uncollected mail already in their mailbox Telstra would then reject the message based on the total size of incoming messages exceeding their 15Mb allowance per user.{Effective 12/4/2001}

(Just to show we are not Telstra bashing we know of at least two other well known ISPs that limit messages to 2Mb and 3Mb respectively).

Some recipients that are inside company networks have further limits imposed by the company themselves. Many companies impose limits on the size of messages that can be sent and retrieved. This prevents their network from being overloaded. Some selectively block large files until after business hours.

Answer
At best, sending large electronic mail messages - greater than 2Mb in size - will be slow. If possible try zipping (compressing) files to decrease their size using a product such as winzip (http://www.winzip.com) or a similar program. If these files are still too large to send after being zipped try using the compression program to create multiple smaller files that can then be sent and reassembled at the other end. (Make sure your recipient has the software to do this first though).

Alternatively consider if what you are sending can be placed on your organisations web site. All you then need to do is send a url to the other user so they can retrieve the information themselves using a web browser. This is particularly relevant if what you are sending gets sent repeatedly to different people. The http://www.tech2u.com.au reference you see us make in these messages is an example of sending someone the url of a web page. Try clicking on it now and see how it takes you to the web site identified.

If you have any further Internet questions please feel free to contact our help number. For assistance in loading files or images to a web page please contact support@tech2u.com.au.

Happy emailing.

These and other useful tips can be found at http://www.tech2u.com.au under Member Services.