Like most Internet Service Providers, ITS limits the size of email attachments. The size of an attachment you can send or receive from your Albany email account depends on which email system you’re using:

Exchange (using Outlook or Outlook Web Access) – 20 megabytes (50 megabytes if you are sending to another Exchange user on campus)
Unix mail (using a mail client e.g. Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Eudora) – 20 megabytes
Unix mail (using the UAlbany Webmail interface) – 10 megabytes*

Most email servers are set up to exclude large attachments because they create a high volume of network traffic and can easily fill an Inbox. By restricting their size, attachments can be delivered quickly and successfully. Here is a sample of size limitations from some popular Internet Service Providers:

Yahoo – 10 megabytes
Hotmail – 10 megabytes
Gmail – 20 megabytes
AOL – 16 megabytes
Mail services in educational (.edu) institutions – 2-25 megabytes

Please note that when you add an attachment, the size of the file may increase because additional information (“transport encoding”) is automatically added.  (“Transport encoding” is information that allows the attachment and message to be safely sent and read.)

This means that attachments that are smaller in size than 20 mB may be pushed above the 20 mB size when the additional information is added.  When this happens, your message will not be sent because it exceeds the 20 mB limit.

Please also note that you may not be able to send large attachments to contacts who use email services with smaller attachment limits.  If this happens, your message will bounce and you may need to find alternate ways of sending the message.

* The Webmail interface uses significantly more resources than a typical mail client when sending an attachment. In order to conserve resources on this multi-user system, a lower (5 megabytes) attachment size limit is set.