Re: Email messages: How large is too large?

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald at Alvestrand.no>]

At 11:25 12.12.99 -0800, Fred Marshall wrote:

> Imposing limits as guidelines may help somewhat but I'd suggest that we're
> talking about a small fraction of the bandwidth and memory use anyway - the
> increase in numbers of users will far oustrip the addition of message size
> statistics - photos or no.  Accordingly, no limits as guidelines either.
>
> I favor free enterprise in this case - which would appear to be "no change".
> When locally imposed limits become too restrictive, people will complain and
> solutions will be found - either the messages will get smaller or the limits
> will be increased or the user will find a new provider or.....  It seems
> clear that there's no magic number.
>
> Fred

Agreed.
I generally set limits in 2 places:

- on my spool area, so that no single message fills it.
  That's called "protecting the infrastructure", and everyone should do that
  (and monitor the number of times the limit triggers, so that they know
  when to buy larger spooldisks).
- on my mailing lists, according to what they're used for (those few that
  want Word documents to be a regular feature get a higher limit).

I see no need for any hard limits - but perhaps words of advice could be nice.
Over to the user services area.....

                      Harald

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand at edb.maxware.no