Submission + - Why have email attachment sizes not grown
Stonefish writes: Email system are quite capable of sending and receiving large attachments however size limits are generally tiny. In the late 1990s I worked for a research organisation maintaining their mail system and had recently introduced mail size constraints. Within the first day it had blocked a number of emails including a 700MB attachment. Being a master of all thing Internet I called him up to tell him how firstly how such a large email would cause problems for the receiver and secondly how there were far more efficient ways of sending things. Given that he was on the same campus he invited me down to his lab to discuss this further. After showing me round his lab which was pretty impressive apart from the large "Biohazard" and "Radioactive" materials labels on the doors. He told me that the facility that he was sending the attachments to was a supercomputing hub with similar "Fat" pipes to the Internet so the large emails weren't a problem. I then spoke about the "efficiency" of the mail protocol and he said that he'd show me what efficient was and did a quick, "drag, drop and send" of another 700MB file of his latest research results. He was right, I was wrong, it was efficient from his perspective and all his previous emails were easily available demonstrating when and where they were sent. As a result of this we changed our architecture and bought bulk cheap storage for email as it was a cheap, searchable and business focused approach to communications.
However 20 years plus later even though networks tens of thousands of times faster and storage is tens of thousands of times cheaper email size limits remain about the same. However email remains cheap, efficient and ubiquitous. Instead we expect people to upload a files to a site and generate a link and embed in a manner that means we lose control of our data or it dissapears in 12 months.
However 20 years plus later even though networks tens of thousands of times faster and storage is tens of thousands of times cheaper email size limits remain about the same. However email remains cheap, efficient and ubiquitous. Instead we expect people to upload a files to a site and generate a link and embed in a manner that means we lose control of our data or it dissapears in 12 months.
