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Mail Servers & Attachments

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by shamonk

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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?

7 replies

by true_texan

Your tech guy is probably correct. People didn't have 1.5MB attachments in mind when SMTP was created, but most mail services should be able to handle it. Mail servers may appear to process smaller messages more quickly, but that's usually due to smaller messages arriving in fewer packets. Larger messages take more packets, and more of them tend to get lost and need to be resent. Until you make up your mind how to handle the problem in the future, I would suggest a compression program like WinZip. You could compress your attachments and ease the burden you are placing on the mail servers.

Hope this helps!

by isys

SMTP does fine. When you send a file attachment it is encoded into ASCII text via MIME (or uuencode or bin/hex, depending on the OS) by your PC and sent to the SMTP server where it is transmitted over the Internet. When it is received at the destination it is stored in the recipient's mail box until retrieval, when it is reassembled into the original document. Where you will have problems is with post offices that limit the size of the in box. Your mail will be rejected if the message and attachment put the box over the size limit.

by chris hirst

There is nothing unusual or difficult in your requirements, Change your ISP for one that will handle the traffic. Couple of things you will need to look at as your needs increase is the bandwidth from your office out and possibly setting up your ownSMTP Outgoing only server.

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