10MB Limit?

I'm trying to send a friend an email with an attatchment. In all, the email is about 15MB, but Mail won't let me send the file because it says "Your message has size 15.4 MB, which exceeds 10.0 MB, the maximum allowed by the server."

What does this mean? Can I fix this? I've sent emails before that were bigger then 10MB, so what's the deal now? Is this a problem on my end or Apple's?

Someone please help.

iMac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Mar 14, 2006 8:25 AM

Reply
4 replies

Mar 14, 2006 9:55 AM in response to Mac Maven

If you are sending this message with large attachment with a .Mac account, .Mac has a 10MB overall message size limit for received and sent messages and most ISPs and email account providers have similar or some limit on the size of received and sent messages.

Even if you can send a message that is about 15MB in size with your email account, the recipient's incoming mail server may have a smaller message size limit for received messages and the message will be rejected.

The email account provided by my ISP has a 10MB incoming mail server storage limit total for all received messages so even if my incoming mail server storage is completely empty and someone can send a message with attachment that totals 15MB in size, the message would be rejected by the incoming mail server for my ISP's email account since the size of the message is over my incoming mail server storage limit.

In addition in case you are not aware, all attachments must be encoded before being sent. The Mail.app uses MIME 1.0 for attachment encoding which is the internet standard. The encoding process increases the size of the pre-encoded file by 50% of so. A pre-encoded file that is 5MB in size will be roughly 7.5MB in size after the encoding process.

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10MB Limit?

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