Outer Limits Consulting

Email is a handy way to send and receive files (as attachments), but it's easy to overload a mail server (either your outgoing or incoming email servers) by trying to send attachments that are too large.

Some email servers implement size limits on emails to stop you from sending emails that are too large, others will attempt to transfer the email. Remember that even if the sender's email server is able to handle a large file, the receiver's email server might not.

To avoid problems it is best to limit the size of attachments in emails. There are other ways of transferring large files, like FTP, that are designed for large files.

Here is a chart that shows how Microsoft Outlook 2003 classifies email sizes.

OUTLOOK MESSAGE SIZE CLASSIFICATION
Enormous	greater than 5 MB
Huge	between 1MB and 5 MB
Very Large	between 500 KB and 1 MB
Large	between 100 KB and 500 KB
Regular	less than 100 KB

Most email servers have trouble sending/receiving anything over 1 MB.
Some servers have increased there size limit to 5 MB, but you still run the risk of having problems is you send anything larger than that.

Large Message STUCK in Outbox?
If you accidentally sent a message that is too large and it's stuck in the Outbox folder, you might have trouble deleting it. First you must get Outlook to stop sending it by going into Offline mode.

Go to the menu on top and select File and then Work Offline.

Now you can go to the Outbox folder and either delete the large message or move it to your Drafts folder.
Then you can go back into Online mode by going to File menu again and unchecking the "Work Offline" box.