How big a file can be emailed?

I emailed someone a jpeg and they asked for a bigger file. Just how big a file can be emailed over reasonably fast connection. Jepg or TIFF? The TIFF is about 17mb and there are two.

THe size limit is usually controlled by the ISP's, usually you can send anything, but most have some limitations on "mailbox" sizes. It's all up to them and the stability of the connections on each end.

17mb on regular DSL here,would take about 1.5 minutes

Jim

Even better: post them on the Web and provide a link. There are so many free file hosts, here is just one: http://sendspace.com/

AOL for example used to have a 500k limit for received attachments. GMail I think has a 20MB per-attachment limit.

10mb on Yahoo.

 

The file can be split and sent in 2 emails. It would have to be combined again. I would use 7z-zip.

 

File hosting is the best but make sure the person you send the link to has the space. Does the person your emailing to using a home PC.

Some companies and schools only have 50megs of personal server space and could already be close to maxing out. Can get around that by downloading to a thumb drive.

http://www.7-zip.org/

"How big a file can be emailed?" - Ask your Internet provider, or just try.

It takes two to tango, here. Your own ISP may limit outbound files attachment size, and the ISP of the person who recieves your message may limit incoming attachment size. When in doubt, keep it under 10MB. It's FAR more polite to host the image file on your own web site (or a similar spot to which you have access), and simply to send an HTML link. That way, if the person you're sending to wants someone else to also take a look, they're just passing along a small string of text, rather than trying again upload the image through their mail server as they forward it.

If the file involved is very big, I second the suggestion to find a free file hosting service, such as http://www.box.net or one of the others mentioned, as a favor to the recipient. Most email programs download mail sequentially, and a very large attachment can stall the recipient's mail for quite some time, especially if he's on dialup. Some isp's will time out before the download is complete, making it virtually impossible to get any mail at all without using a program that can access mail directly on the server.

There is a lady who gets me to fix her computer every now and then. She gave me a call one day and said that she had not been able to use her email for about a week. I tried remoting into her computer but quickly gave up as it was too slow so I went to her house. Turns out she was trying to send an email with a couple of hundred megs of photos attached. The send was failing presumably due to her ISP but outlook kept trying to resend it. Her automatic sending interval was shorter than the time the attempted send was taking as well so her computer was basically using 100% of her bandwidth 100% of the time. I killed the network connection, deleted the unsent email and restored her network connection.

 

Now here's the punch line.

Her internet plan included a finite volume of file transfers. After this limit is reached the ISP charges a ridiculous excess charge per MB. When the bill arrived for the month when she had this problem she found that instead of her usual bill of about $60 she instead had a bill of just over $1,000. Potentially it could have been far worse had the problem gone on for longer.

 

The moral of this story is that if you are going to be sending an email with a large attachment which may fail make sure that you check to see that the email has sent successfully or else you may be in for a very expensive shock.

I want to reiterate something implied in Matt's post above.

 

NEVER send a huge file to someone who is not expecting it and has not given their OK before you send. Otherwise, they are likely to think their application has frozen or crashed, etc. etc, even if it does come through. It's just a matter of courtesy.

"...It's just a matter of courtesy."

 

And basic, fundamental computer literacy as well.

<p>hey there are many way have you tired using dropbox to send large files<br>

apart from that you could also upload your file/s somewhere else like <a href="http://emailattachment.net/">http://emailattachment.net/</a><br>

and send the link you get in an email<br>

hope this helps in someway regards :)</p>

<p>I use Dropbox, much easier.</p>

<p>Regarding large files through email, it's not just the ISP. It can also be the mail server on either end, which has nothing to do with ISP restrictions.</p>