Why haven’t email attachment file size limits increased over the years?
In: Technology
One big problem with email is that, if a message has multiple recipients, the entire mail message is duplicated for every recipient. If some company has 1000 employees and someone emails out a 5MB PDF to all employees, then the mail server will need 5GB of space for all those emails.
In addition, the protocols that handle email inboxes means that you have to download the whole of waiting email. You can’t easily pick and choose what to download. If you send someone an overly large attachment, it can prevent them from accessing their inbox at all (This is even a problem for webmail systems which have to handle all the processing of these files, which can cause server-wide problems)
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