What's your maximum email message size, and what do you do for bigger files?

As the subject says... We're using Exchange 2007 and (mostly) Outlook 2003 and have a limit of 20MB. For larger files, we have an ftp server that people inside can easily copy files to or from, and we have an account on that server that we can give out to outsiders to use to upload or download files. The ftp server is an old NAS box that didn't work well, so it's got nothing else on it, the passwords get changed frequently and the files put on it are wiped every day.

I know there are services that can be used instead of having our own ftp server, I'm wondering which ones people have had good/bad experiences with.

We typically limit our emails to 10-15mb tops. Email clients weren't really intended to be used for large file transfers.

These 3 services provide free (or pay with additional options) large file transfer services. They are all relatively quick and won't jam up your email systems. They basically use a two step process. First you upload your file(s) via their web page, and then their server emails the intended recipient a link to the file so they can download the files(s) via their web browser. If you're sending it to multiple people and/or you don't remember their email addresses, send it to yourself. Then you can forward it using addresses from your email client.

transferbigfiles.com -- free, the simplest, allows multiple files, password protection, & multiple recipients

yousendit.com -- largest file transfer site, free & pay plans (more features), free still allows multiple files

hotshare.net -- free, one file at a time, additional tools - website embedded code, thumbnails, forum links, etc.

We limit our total message size to 30MB. The e-mail server can handle much larger, but we found that anything more than that and some users would have their mail client "lock up" on them while it downloaded the message. Outlook 2003 over IMAP is notorious for appearing to lock up while it downloads the message if you have the preview window enabled. 30MB was a good trade-off between getting support calls for e-mail lockups and support calls for messages bouncing because they are too big.

For larger files, we have an FTP dropbox that some clients use to post files and then they send a link for others to go get them (in the format ftp://user:[email protected]/somefile.txt). These are, obviously, more technical than your average user. Generally we see CAD drawings pass through that way.

Otherwise, we send them to a large file sending service such as SendThisFile. There are tons of them out there, some free, some not, with varying degrees of complexity.