Email Size Limits

One-Size-Fits-All Email Limits Don't Work

Many employers limit email attachments to 10MB in an attempt to block large images, audio and video files.  While size limits appear to make sense, they actually don't work.  These limits can interfere with business operations by preventing the delivery of urgent documents, such as financial spreadsheets and sales presentations.  In addition, one-size-fits-all message limits do not solve enterprise bandwidth and storage problems.

Permessa’s extensive analysis of email at large enterprises shows that messages ranging between 1-5MB have a greater impact on the infrastructure than 10MB files.  The reason is the ripple effect of these files when they are sent to many recipients throughout an enterprise, such as to a team or department. Extremely large emails often have negligible impact because they are usually sent to a few recipients.

Smart email size limits measure the total impact of a message, which is based on message size, the total number of recipients, the distance to the recipients and other infrastructure measurements.  For example, a single 20MB message sent within the same office will have a lower impact then a 5MB file sent to ten people across an enterprise.  Yet, in most organizations, it would only be the 20MB message that would be blocked.

The following email best practices can help reduce the problem:

• Set “smart” message size limits and quotas that measure the total impact of a message rather than the first copy of a message.
• Make exception rules for high-impact users with business-critical needs, such as executives, the financial team and sales management. This step ensures that business operations don’t suffer due to message size limitations.
• Allow individual users to bypass limits, with a notification to management that the limit has been bypassed. Repeated offenders can have this privilege revoked.

Permessa Email Control! with Permessa Email Policy Enforcer automatically makes best practice recommendations based on the size of messages sent. It provides continuous monitoring of the email system and it can also enforce message size limits by group and individual.