TRANSFERRING LARGER FILESE-mail attachments are a convenient way to transfer files, but the e-mail system is designed to handle a high volume of mostly small, mostly plain text messages. Larger files cause problems for servers, clients, and the network, so size limits are enforced on each mail system. The size limits on campus systems vary from about one to up to about 40 megabytes. Generally files over a few megabytes should be transferred using some other mechanism. Many e-mail systems elsewhere limit incoming messages to one megabyte. Since e-mail is text oriented file attachments that are binary objects - things like images, sounds, etc. — must be encoded. This effectively doubles their size during transport. Typical methods for moving files between machines are shared areas on file servers; FTP (file transfer protocol — our version of VM/CMS does not support SFTP), either directly between machines or using an intermediate server; or using a web server, again either directly or through an intermediate. In some cases it may be faster to use large removable media like a CD or DVD. Contact your local system administrator or the I.T. Help Desk for more details. |