Why haven’t email attachment file size limits increased over the years?
In: Technology
The answer is that it has a little bit…
Exchange 2003 has 10mb limit, then Gmail comes along and it’s 25mb.
The problem is that “email” is not a unified standard – there are so many different providers and email systems that backwards compatability is very important. If I email from my work email address (which is on Exchange 2010) to my personal Gmail account, and then forward it to your personal address which is running off a SendMail email server – they all have to agree.
Because of this everyone has their own arbitrary standards that have kind of stuck. There is no reason why Gmail couldn’t decide ‘max attachment size 40mb’ other than Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL don’t support larger than 10mb and you’re creating yourself a problem.
Take Exchange 2016, you can configure for your org within your org that the limit is 20mb. Or 22mb. But this doesn’t work when emailing people outside your org, so you leave it at 10mb because this plays well with others and that is far more important than trying to make Email a file storage system.
> One big problem with email is that, if a message has multiple recipients, the entire mail message is duplicated for every recipient.
This for instance has not been true for a while.
> In addition, the protocols that handle email inboxes means that you have to download the whole of waiting email.
This is probably not true, but may depend on what email client you are using. If you have Outlook Express running POP3 then yes it’s true, but it’s not 2003 anymore so it’s probably not true.
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