The Reality of E-Mails 10GB In Size

The next iteration of the Windows Live suite is called “Wave 4” by Microsoft. This will include changes both for local and web applications.

On the web app side of things, Hotmail is one of the biggies, and Wave 4 is going to bring about several significant changes. The ones you’ll most likely make most note of are:

• A single file attachment can be as large as 50MB.
• The total size of all file attachments to a single email can be 10GB. And no, that’s not a typo.
• Threaded conversations
• Flags

The one that sticks out to me most is obviously the allowance of a single email that can have 10GB’s worth of file attachments – which is insane.

This does mean you could use an archiving utility like 7-Zip to break up super-large files into 50MB pieces, attach them all to a single email and send that way. Want to send a CD-sized Linux distro in email? Go right ahead. Want to send a DVD-sized distro? You could send two!

Reality check

While the gobs and gobs of big files you could send sounds really attractive, there are a few downers.

The download will take how long?

For those of you that have ever downloaded a 4GB torrent of a Linux distro, you know it doesn’t matter even if you have tons of people seeding and a super-fast connection, because 4GBs takes a while. Yes, your download should be faster given you’re directly downloading from the Hotmail servers, but still.. 4GB is 4GB. It won’t be speedy – and that’s just 4 and not 10.

The upload will take how long?

In the United States, ISP service is configured in such a way where the upload rate is throttled significantly compared to the download rate. As such, uploading takes much longer than downloading.

For example, downloading 50MB of data on a “basic” broadband connection from a fast server can easily be done in under a minute, but the same amount of data uploaded? That will take longer. A lot longer.

A 10GB email will easily crash an email client

A 100MB email can hose an email client, never mind 10GBs.

Gargantuan-sized emails are definitely a web-only thing. For most of us, the biggest single email we’ve ever received was under 25MB. Mail clients can handle emails of that size easily, and it’s safe to say they can probably handle up to 100MB without a problem.

When you pass the 100MB mark for a single email, you have trouble because mail clients were never designed to handle emails that size, save for Microsoft Outlook 2003-present that can have a mail database size of up to 33TB.. assuming you had hard drive space that even comes close to that.

Other clients that use the MBOX format (like Mozilla Thunderbird) technically do not have any predefined limit as to how large an MBOX can be, but could it handle single emails of 10GB in size? That’s an unknown, but the answer is most likely no on a local level.

Will anybody other than Gmail be able to even accept super-huge emails?

Gmail as far as I know doesn’t have any predefined limit for what it can receive concerning individual email size. As far as what it can send, it’s limited to 25MB, but it should be able to receive even the largest of mails.

Yahoo! Mail can also most likely receive super-large mails as well, but I can’t confirm whether that’s true or not.

As for all the other mail providers, be they other web services, ISP-assigned email and so on, what are their limits? It’s a good bet that it’s probably 25MB at the most per each email received. For others, the limit can be as little as 5MB. Many in-office mail servers are purposely configured to a 5MB individual email size limit.

What this means is that in order to take full advantage of sending super-huge mails, it must be Hotmail-to-Hotmail or Hotmail-to-Gmail. Sending anywhere else will most likely result in the receiving mail server spitting back a nastygram your way to the tune of, “HEY! We don’t accept emails of that size!”

Does this spell out the true beginning of the end for local mail clients?

This is best answered by asking a simple question – what can webmail do better than a mail client?

The answers have been:

1. Convenience (access your mail from anywhere)
2. Synchronization (ties in with a smartphone easily)

Now, or soon-to-be now, we have a third answer: The ability to handle very large files in the most convenient way possible.

Up to this point, if you wanted to send very large files to someone else via the internet, you had to use a file sharing service. If you wanted these files to be private, you had to go through the inconvenience of setting up special access, possibly creating invitation “codes” and the like.

Soon however, you’ll be able to send large files that go directly to the recipient’s address with no special configuration/access needed. The file sharing service can be completely bypassed, and this is significant because it’s more convenient and faster to get the files out that you need to.

In addition, you soon be able to send large files to yourself and use your own email as a backup. We’ve been able to do this for a while but were limited to 25MB per each email/file. Soon enough the 10GB option will be there. And even though each file can only be 50MB in size, as said above you can file-split it and attach all the files to a single email as long as the total size is under 10GB. Remember that 10GB is over 2 DVD-5’s worth of data.

(Side note: 10GB broken up into 50MB pieces would be 200 files total. Given the fact that Hotmail will allow 10GB emails, it is assumed it will allow ridiculous amounts of file attachments as well to accommodate for the size, because there would be no other way to do it.)

Traditional mail clients obviously can’t do any of that because everything is stored locally, and if you dared try to open single emails of 10GB in size from within a mail client on a local level, chances are high your mail client would crash and probably take your OS with it (even for Mac or Linux). When you open files of that size outside of the mail client, you’re good to go. But from within the client that could spell out crash-and-burn in short order.

What do you think?

Will the ability to handle emails up to 10GBs be a good thing? Does it put the final nail in the coffin for free email clients?

Let us know by writing a comment or two.