So what's the average size cap on email these days?

[Zoidberg]

I notice I've been sending emails upwards near 20MB lately without much fuss. Sometimes it's a matter of the recipient; their (older?) system rejects the message (but I don't find out about it until the next day or so). I've taken to using YouSendIt for just about anything over 10 or 15 MB just to be on the safe side. And yeah, I know I can dropbox it with a link, but YouSendIt is a little more seamless via their app. I generally like it.

But it got me wondering, is there a standard cap these days? Ages ago, I remember being told at a company I worked at to keep it under 5MB, then later 10MB. And, like I said, I've been sending/receiving emails in the 20MB range lately.

[M A V I C]

It sort of depends. ISPs and free email providers have slowly been bringing up their caps. I think most are over 20MB, close to 30MB.

But paid email providers have been bringing down their email caps. Dreamhost for example, used to let you send several hundred MB but they've been cranking it down. I think they're just under 40MB now.

[MGS_forgot_password]

Don't forget that MIME encoding adds around 30% to the size of the email.

[Z]

We boinged our cap up at work to 20mb a while back...

[NewtonMP2100]

.....not sure....but hopin' to bust a CAP in it........

[rz]

Our cap at work is about 10MB. And there's a limit on the size of our mailbox: 50MB. Yup, 50 Megabytes. That's for inbox, sent mail, calendar, everything. I can empty out just about everything, and when I come back from a long weekend can be at or above the cap. They'll let us pass the cap by up to 10MB for incoming email, but we can't send anything out until we're under the 50MB limit. It's horrible.

[sekker]

5 MB here - and for a $7B (B=billion) a year organization!

Ridiculous.

But used to be 2MB last year.

Exchange server 2003, Baby, all the way.

They hate me - I get 100 MB a day when grant-wriing even with the cap because the exchange server space sucks. They have moved me three times this year to different severs without asking me to try to cut down my use

I now have both gmail and mobile me accounts to deal with this horrible support.