Solving Problems with File Attachments
File attachments are becoming more commonplace in Internet e-mail, not only in business communication, but large file attachments are regularly circulated across the Internet in the form of digital photos, video, and audio clips. The following are items to keep in mind as you send/receive file attachments, and this may help you steer clear of the most common file attachment problems.
- Review the size of the file before you attach it.
This normally isn't necessary for most text documents, but large graphics, media files, digital photos, etc., may need to be reviewed before sending. Because PortalMedia hosts many graphic design and professional photography customers, we actually set the limit of e-mail size quite high at 20 MB. Many major ISPs, however, set their file size limits to much lower (2 to 5 MB, typically). In addition, many customers on even the fastest of broadband connections may have a slower upload speed, and files much larger than a few megabytes may take a very long time to leave your outbox. For these reasons, it is generally prudent to limit the size of e-mail file attachments as much as possible. In general, if you routinely expect to exchange very large files with other people, it's a good practice to set up FTP services with PortalMedia, which is currently a preferred medium for uploading/downloading large files across the Internet. - Certain file types are banned from e-mail systems for security
reasons.
Our system, and many systems, restrict the attachment of certain 'unsafe' executable file types, including EXE, BAT, PIF, VBS, and a few others. On our system, you can work around this issue by placing these file types into a ZIP archive, and then attaching the ZIP to the e-mail. - Make sure your server-side mailbox is clean of messages with large
file attachments.
If you receive several large files in your e-mail every day, your server-side mailbox can fill up quickly. Make sure you are regularly downloading these messages to your computer and removing them from your server-side inbox. If this is routinely becoming a problem, please contact support at 608-268-1410 or e-mail support@portalmedia.com and we can work with you to provide a solution that will work for your situation.
