UK ISP Virgin Media Business has revealed that 69% of office workers cannot send or receive emails larger than 10MB (MegaByte's) in size, which rises to 89% for messages larger than 15MB. These restrictions mean that many people are unable to share large documents, slideshows and video content by email, with big messages often bouncing back.


In fairness the situation is often a little more complicated than that, especially if your recipient is stuck with a slower connection. Likewise some email servers can be a lot slower than the internet connection itself because they are often operated remotely and may not be given as much bandwidth priority.

Both of these factors can easily cause larger attachments to clog up inboxes and delay the delivery of other messages. At least some of this can be solved by enabling "Message Previews", which allows the email to be previewed before you choose to download the entire content.

However it's fair to say that the email service itself hasn't changed all that much since it was first introduced back in the early 1980's. It was never really meant to carry big file attachments and these days P2P, Cyberlockers (file storage/sharing websites), FTP and sometimes even Instant Messaging (IM) are better solutions. Provided your ISP doesn't penalise all P2P/IM traffic of course.