Size limits on Corporate mail systems?

  • Thread starter Thread starter ajf
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Skidilliplop said:
If it's a single account shared among everyone it's not so bad, security is ok if people use the "friends" options in it rather than public links. Also with the luxury of an expensive firewall I can control which bits they can use. I.e web based http upload only not the local app and sync feature.
If you were really that bothered you could set up a sync folder that had auditing on it to recored exactly what was uploaded and shared to private and public folders. You can also (with my firewall anyway) limit it to uploading .zip files with passwords on as well.

For a techie Secure FTP is better, but for end users it's not practical because they don't understand it fully. The remote site needs to have it permitted through their firewall which most dont, you still have to create and send FTP usernames and passwords to the remote users which is something IT would end up doing. If you let users do it, you're in the same boat not known who they've shared the username and password with or they won't get their heads around doing it at all...

You could use a private CMS portal which remote parties had to register an account on before being able to download stuff, but that's significant time effort and money invested, so unless it's a mission critical daily task it's not usually worth it.
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Even with full logging it's still very hard to see what was sent. I mean what really was in the WorkDocuments.zip and who has got the time to audit the logs.

We have a transfer site which accepts both http and SFTP. Users don't need to know how SFTP works because they can simply upload it to the web portal whereby the documents automatically get zipped and fully audited (i.e. where the file came from)

I wouldn't ever use something like Dropbox for a corporate solution. Even a free SFTP server which has to be managed by IT is better (i.e. user raises a call to put a file on the SFTP server, create account for Joe Bloggs at Blah.org, etc.). Yes it's more work for IT (probably amounts to a hour a month) but it's much more secure and you shouldn't then have to worry about data loss - which is much harder to explain than the few second inconvenience to IT.



M.
 
Sin_Chase said:
50Mb has never been and NEVER will be a reasonable size for an email.

Email is not for data transfer.
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+1 I can't see any Enterprise scale organisation allowing limits like that. Imagine the impact on the size of mailboxes, databases and the requirements on the storage.
 
Even if the company is happy to accommodate those sizes what other company will? Very few, which negates the point of email as nobody will receive anything you send.

It will just generate loads of work for the recipient/their IT and the senders IT. Infact, I would hazard a guess many organisations would not even send a NDR for a 50MB email, I have configured many sites that would point blank refuse the connection and send no NDR for a mail of that size.
 
Sin_Chase said:
Even if the company is happy to accommodate those sizes what other company will? Very few, which negates the point of email as nobody will receive anything you send.

It will just generate loads of work for the recipient/their IT and the senders IT. Infact, I would hazard a guess many organisations would not even send a NDR for a 50MB email, I have configured many sites that would point blank refuse the connection and send no NDR for a mail of that size.
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It seems to be smaller organisations that are guilty of abusing email in this way. A lot of the places the company I work for supports get us to increase their limits to 50MB, then complain when it takes hours to get email to send over their poxy ADSL connections only for the mail to be bounced back.

I personally think 10MB is about right, and I agree that anything bigger should be sent via other means.
 
It depends on the amount of users in the network, their mail usage in general, as well as the frequency of users going to send large emails as well as the resources of the email server and the wan link bandwidth.

Most sites i work at have a 20-25mb limit but one has 50mbyte. Most sites i work at have 25mbit fiber connections so sending a few large emails does not realy affect the network.

At this one site one user has a 26gb mailbox. :O then they phone up wondering why there outlook is slow.
 
Sin_Chase said:
50Mb has never been and NEVER will be a reasonable size for an email.

Email is not for data transfer.
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Agree it isn't for data transfer, but maybe ten years ago 50Mb was considered large for even downloads, today 50Mb is peanuts.
 
Sin_Chase said:
Even if the company is happy to accommodate those sizes what other company will? Very few, which negates the point of email as nobody will receive anything you send.

It will just generate loads of work for the recipient/their IT and the senders IT. Infact, I would hazard a guess many organisations would not even send a NDR for a 50MB email, I have configured many sites that would point blank refuse the connection and send no NDR for a mail of that size.
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As I said, the only large emails are to printers and the like, who regularly receive large files, like EPS files...

Fortunately we only have around 100 mailboxes, and plenty of storage, so not an issue for us..
 
We have a ridiculously high 100MB limit for emails, although our quarantine system will withhold anything over 30MB so it can be checked by IT first.

This high limit is due for a review though as it was originally set that high due no link between our original two sites Netware systems. It was easier to let staff transfer data between sites via email than manage an FTP server or similar. Now we're all using the same AD systems there's no need for such a high limit.
 
10mb between 08:00 and 18:00 and 25mb outside this time, all files over 10mb sent during core hours are queued. There is an internal document upload system for certain departments but otherwise unless a third party can provide a system to transfer files that isn't blocked then standard instruction is to post it. No ftp unless you're really high up and even then it breaks all the time and is more hassle than it's worth to users.

Our head office and legal teams just send couriers to get urgent documents over 10mb transfered as they're on a different cost centre and often can't wait for admitedly slow assistance.
 
This company called workshare has just created a new product that allows you to send emails through the internet from your email client. I am not sure exactly how it works as it just came out. But we use the workshare professional software at law firms i work at and this new product comes free with the next release. apparently you can send an email as normal and then if it is over a certain size it sends it via https or something. It gives the users who receive the email an email with a link to download the files from https.
 
I would agree that 10-20 MB is reasonable. I've worked for organisations in the past where people decided to send large mails to '[email protected]' and brought the network to a crawl for hours at a time...!
 
Unlimited in, 70mb out :P

We receive very large plans though and the general opinion of the management is the system should be unintrusive. Probably why we have people with 20Gb mailboxes...
 
At university I remember someone sending a gigabyte+ email and it was delivered ok internally after slowing the mailsystem down for several thousand other users... They were staff rather than student and should have known better...
 
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