One of the things I spend an untoward amount of time on when working with my older clients is the business of uploading and downloading e-mail attachments. But lest you think I’m being ageist here, back in my days in Corporate America, I had to frequently remind the Cow Orkers about attachment size limitations and the evil practice of not clearing out huge attachments from one’s Exchange mailbox. Most cubicle cattle seem to hold to the belief that attachment limits and mailbox sizes are just IT Department power trips and routinely ignore the various warnings they receive, then cry bloody murder when their e-mail account gets locked out or they suffer data loss from exceeding the recommended size limit of their Exchange mailbox.
So Google didn’t exactly HELP by upping the size limit on Gmail file attachments to 25MB a few months ago. In a world where a single PowerPoint presentation can top out at twice that size, or when people want to mail video clips, there’s definitely an argument to be made for it, but this blog post from a Google Minion explains what it really means in terms of system overhead and why you should not mail that funny cat video to everyone you ever met.
