In June Google increased the maximum attachment size of a message to be 25MB. Some users are still hungry for larger sizes – but that’s a bad idea.
People who send out large attachments rarely understand what happens and the affects it can have when they do this. There is a practice of users just sending whatever they want without thinking.
Think twice before sending all those big files
The way in which email attachments work (MIME encoding) is to send binary attachments, which actually expands a message by about 30% in size. So to put it another way if you sent a 15MB attachment, this actually turns into 20MB as it’s sent across the Internet, and that doesn’t include the text part of the email or the message headers (message headers are a bit like postmarks if you’re interested).
Now say you were to send the same message to more than one person, let’s choose 20 people. 20 people x 20MB email = 400MB. That is half a CD’s worth of data!
If 5 of the recipients are at the same office and using the same mail server, getting the server to download the same message 5 times over on their [fast] broadband connection will take roughly ten minutes. That’s 10 minutes for the same email, to 5 people, all in the same workspace. Because the sender copied 5 separate email addresses, the mail server sees it a five separate emails (they are unique only because of this).
It also means that the mail server is tied-up downloading these messages, and other messages have to be queued-up … waiting to be downloaded.
It’s just like those days where you send someone a message which is urgent and ask them “has it arrived yet?” and you have to say “no”, despite the message being sent some long, long minutes ago. You may well have heard people say “emails are running really slow today” – this is often why.
If the sender instead uses a file sharing site for such as YouTube or SkyDrive the file is compressed down and maybe cached by the office network or service provider, helping to reduce delays, bandwidth and slow speed issues. Don’t send all those photos via email, post them on Facebook or SkyDrive (it’s really good, and you can customise to your heart’s content who sees what) and send the link to your friends.
In other words, sending out large attachments via email is a no, no. It’s like getting the Post Office to become your moving company!
This article was inspired by a post from Google Operating System
