doc said:
Suddenly I have become unable to send mail containing jpg files. Message
says file is too big (3 photos - about 18 mb). Until about 2 weeks ago I
could send 8 to 10 jpg files in an email without problems. My ISP says they
have not created any size limitations. Any suggestions
File transfers don't have a size limitation (other than perhaps a monthly
bandwidth cap enforced by your ISP). You aren't doing a file transfer. You
are sending a message through their e-mail server. Ask them their E-MAIL
quota for maximum size for a message.
Also, the size of your attachments do not tell you the size of the e-mail
that you send. All e-mail gets sent as text. That means attachments get
encoded into long text strings inside of MIME parts inside the body of your
e-mail. Encoding bloats the size of the content being attached by 137%, or
a lot more. So that 18MB could end up being 24.7MB plus the size for the
body (times 2 if you use HTML instead of plain text) plus the size for the
headers. While composing an e-mail and after adding attachments (and if not
using an add-on that doesn't actually add the attachments until you send so
they are getting inserted at the time you are composing and do the attach),
save a copy of it in the Drafts folder (hit Ctrl+S) and check the Size
column there to see what is the actual size of the e-mail you will send.
You never mentioned if these oversized messages are stuck in your Outbox
folder and that is causing continued sending problems.
E-mail is NOT a reliable file transfer mechanism. It wasn't intended or
designed for that. It was designed to send lots of small messages. There
is no CRC check on the file to ensure integrity. There is no resume to
re-retrieve the file if the e-mail download fails. There is no guarantee
the e-mail will arrive uncorrupted. Large e-mails can generate timeouts and
retries due to the delay when anti-virus programs interrogate their content.
Stop using e-mail to send large files. It is rude to the recipient. Not
every recipient might want your large file. Not every recipient has
high-speed broadband Internet access. Many users still use slow dial-up
access, especially if all they do is e-mail. You waste your e-mail
provider's disk space and their bandwidth to send a huge e-mail. You waste
the e-mail provider's disk space and bandwidth at the recipient's end. You
eat up the disk quota for the recipient's mailbox (which could render it
unusable so further e-mails get rejected due to a full mailbox). You
irritate users still on dial-up that have to wait eons waiting to download
your huge e-mail. Some users have usage quotas (i.e., so many bytes/month)
and you waste it with a file that they may not want. Stop being rude. Take
the large file out of the e-mail.
Save the file in online storage and send the recipient a URL link to the
file. Your e-mail remains small. It is more likely to arrive. It is more
likely to be seen. The recipient can decide whether or not and when to
download your large file. Be polite.
Your ISP probably allows many gigabytes of online storage for personal web
pages. Upload your file there and provide a URL link to it. Other methods
(of using online storage), all free, are:
http://www.adrive.com/ (50GB max quota, 2GB max file size)
http://www.driveway.com/ (500MB max file size)
http://www.filefactory.com/ (300MB max file size)
http://www.megashares.com/ (10GB max file size)
http://www.sendspace.com/ (300MB max file size)
http://www.spread-it.com/ (500MB max file size)
http://www.transferbigfiles.com/ (1GB max file size)
http://zshare.net/ (500MB max file size)
http://www.zupload.com/ (500MB max file size)
If it is sensitive content and when storing it online in a public storage
area or to guard it against whomever operates the online storage service,
remember to encrypt it.
