Less and Less responsive to the needs of Business

[#1]

I have a client who  has been sending the same e-mail with a 10Mb (ish) attachment to the same e-mail address for the last couple of years.
The week before last it stopped arriving at the destination.
Various tests followed and it seems that a 5Mb attachment will arrive but a 10Mb won't.
Client's systems checked, recipents checked their systems - no faults found.
A phone call to PN support today revealed that there is an unpublished and un-announced cap of 7Mb (ish!) on mail attachments forwarded through the PN relay servers.
No bounce-back, no message - nothing and no way to get this "cap" lifted.
Would the last business customer laving PlusNet please turn out the light . . .
Keith

[#2]

I just sent two emails from my Plusnet account to another Plusnet account - one with 15MB pdf attachment and one with a 6MB pdf attachment and both arrived with no problems.
Also sent an email to a 1&1 account with a 15MB attachment which arrived OK although according to Outlook Express the size is just over 21MB (I don't understand that)

[#3]

Hi rslsys,
I've had a listen to the call you made to us today.
At the start of the call I can see that one of the team advised that to their knowledge, there was a 7mb limit as you suggest, but in querying this with a colleague during the call, then advised that there isn't a hard limit that would affect sending emails of around 10mb in size.
We do, however, have a 7mb limit for attachments on our webmail platform, which may be where the original confusion had arisen from.
In terms of a physical size limit for attachments through relay.plus.net, our current limit is 100mb.
We'd only recommend sending attachments in size of around 10mb, purely on account of there being a variety of factors that could affect sending content of this size, such as anti-spam settings, or client-side timeout settings.
Hope this clears things up, and please accept my apologies for the initial confusion.

[#4]

Quote from: Oldjim

I just sent two emails from my Plusnet account to another Plusnet account - one with 15MB pdf attachment and one with a 6MB pdf attachment and both arrived with no problems. Also sent an email to a 1&1 account with a 15MB attachment which arrived OK although according to Outlook Express the size is just over 21MB (I don't understand that)

Normally theres extra padding in the conversion of the attachment, was spose to be 10% overhead which wouldn't make a 15mb attachment 21mb!! but you get the idea

[#5]

Try googling "mime encoding overhead" - it's actually about 33%.

[#6]

Back to the original request ... lifting the "cap" is not easy as the nature of the the Internet could mean your email goes through a variety of email servers (MTU?) over which Plusnet has no control.  In addition these large files unless rigorously deleted from sent message queue and the inbox/other folders will tend to clog up the email database on your business's own email server. MS Outlook and Exchange can be a real pain in this respect as the email databases gobbles up more disk space and hard disk back-up time.
A much easier way of handling the transfer of larger documents is to use a document collaboration service where you load a single copy of the document on to a central server then send recipients the internet address of the stored document by email. Google Docs is an obvious example of this, but you can also use  Drop Box or Sugarsync in a similar fashion.  If the recipient needs to retain a copy of the file he/she can easily down load it into a safe storage location on their PC or Server.
Here's an example using Google docs (drive). In the collaboration mode multiple people can work on the same document at the same time, for example during a phone conference or a webinar.