We outsource our email to our ISP because we’re a small publishing firm with IT functions filled half-time by a guy with other responsibilities (me). Every week we send out PDF reports attached to emails; we have 5 different lists ranging from 90 to300 email addresses and the PDF sizes are either mid-size (200 – 300k) or largeish (600k to 1.5MB). We’ve begun to have random delivery problems. One of the ISP tech support guys said we shouldn’t be sending so much mail with attachments, that SMTP wasn’t designed for large messages, and really we should just send links back to our web site, since HTTP is much more efficient. He may be right, but other non-technical reasons push us toward continuing and expanding this approach. Is there any reason a typical mail server couldn’t handle this kind of traffic? Do mail/internet routers slow messages with large attachments, processing smaller msgs faster? Are we foolhardy for thinking we can continue with this setup?
