Which begs the question: why do email services – like Yahoo and the forthcoming G-Mail – limit attachment sizes of incoming and outgoing mail to a piddling 10mgs when there’s a definite market interest in sending/receiving large files via webmail?
I don’t think any webmail service allows files bigger than 40 mgs.
Is there a law that prevents this?
It has to do with the way the message is handled when in transit. Sure, disk space is cheap, so you can pass it around, but bandwidth costs, and so do the cpus needed to process incoming/outgoing messages. The bigger the messages, the less you can process in a given period of time, so you cut down the max size to maximize throughput.
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My suspicion is that it’s more because they do not want people to use the account as as mass storage. For example, I’d like to archive mp3 albums into zip files and store them on my GMAIL account, but the 10 meg limit makes that too difficult/cumbersome to do so (since an album is minimum 40meg or so, and would require breaking it into smaller archives). Hence, they have less data to store and less disk space to buy.
It will take me a lot longer to fill up the acccount with mail, than albums.
As an IT administrator I know that a lot of the restrictions can be attributed to the ridiculously large amounts of bandwidth that e-mail requires. It all comes down to the way e-mail was originally implemented. The thought was 128 characters or 7 bits of data would me more than enough for any message. Let me be clear here – 128 characters refer to the number of characters in a character set. Letters, Numbers, Symbols, etc. Not the length of the message itself. Who knew that someday someone would want to send 8 bit binary messages!?
How to get 8 bits of binary data through a system designed for 7 bits?
MIME (Multipurpose, Internet, Mail, Extensions) was created. MIME (in its simplest sense) does the math of breaking those 8 bit characters down to 7 bits so the message can make its way through the internets mail servers. Once received by the user’s mail client the message is reassembled and the attachment is made available. All this can add as much as 33% to the overall message size.
You can demonstrate this for yourself. Find a file that is close to 1 Meg and note its size. In your mail client attach file to a message. In the client take a look at that the size of the outbound message, surprising isn’t it? Imagine the waste in a 40 Meg file. That would be at least 12 Megs. So if you need to send large files (generally thought of as anything over 5 Megs) it is best to use and FTP program or something similar.
Jim
Yikes, there’s still MIME encoding done? I assumed that they had long since upgraded the email “infrastructure” to 8-bit binary!
Which begs the question, “Why don’t they upgrade the infrastructure?”
The great thing about email is that is a quasi-universal standard. Changing it wouldn’t be a great problem technically. The problem is to get everyone to agree on the next standard. You could either enhance email in some way, use something based on the infrastructure of one of the instant messengers or create a completely new application. However, as long as you don’t achieve world-wide near universal acceptance with all kinds of users, private and commercial, rich and poor, on all kinds of systems, email is still the closest thing to a universal “address” of a person on the net.
Regarding attachment size it is important to realize that bandwidth cost real and significant money as soon as we talk about Gigabytes, but most people would be surprised if their provider asked them to pay several dollars per mail. Currently mails are so cheap because the individual mail requires only little ressources, but a single Gigabyte message equals lots of typical messages.
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but 90% or better of my users are running a Microsoft product to collect his or her mail. If this is true for other parts of the world Bill needs to focus on upgrading his mail programs instead of Windows. If he won’t abandon base 64 encoding for true binary then at the very least he should adopt YENC encoding (http://www.yenc.org/).
Jim
Try this.
Xray,
Not to bad, I have customer for whom I setup a similar system. It’s definitely easier for those who don’t understand how to use FTP. I’ll keep the link in my favorites. Thanks!
It still bothers me, having to work around e-mail to send a large file.
Jim
Thanks for this link, this looks quite useful for me.
And it’s quite an advantage over FTP, not because it’s simpler, but because you don’t have keep to your PC/FTP server running and/or coordinate a transfer time with whomever you are exchanging the file with.
Well I know from having had yahoo mail that if anyone sent me anything larger than half a meg I’d be pretty pissed as my inbox would flood and leave me with no incoming mail.
The moment gMail allows users to send 1GB attachments is the moment everybody and his brother will use it to share music and games. Next stop RIAA lawyers…
I assume you mean this was before free Yahoo accounts were upgraded to 100 MB of storage?