On Friday, May 30, the maximum message size for an email sent through Vmail, the Vanderbilt email system for most faculty and staff powered by Microsoft Exchange, will decrease from 30 MB to 25 MB. The maximum message size includes the size of the email and any attachments combined.
Vanderbilt University Information Technology is making the change as part of preparation to deploy Microsoft Office 365 email services and the Office online suite of tools for the Vanderbilt community.
Vanderbilt provides alternate tools that allow users to send large files:
The following is a list of best practices to use when sending pictures and attachments to reduce size:
Post or publish large attachments
If you are sending attachments or pictures to someone within your organization, use a shared network resource, one of the Vanderbilt file transfer tools listed above, or SharePoint.
Send multiple attachments by using several email messages
Multiple smaller messages have a higher likelihood of being delivered versus one large message. This technique might help you avoid per-message limits, but the recipient’s mailbox limit can still be exceeded. Any messages received after a person’s mailbox has reached its storage limit are typically rejected.
Use compressed graphic file formats
There are far too many graphic file formats to list here, but of the most commonly used, the best picture file formats for email are .jpg, .png and .gif. The largest graphics file formats are those that are not saved in a compressed file format, such as .tif and .bmp.
Use a file compression utility
In addition to third-party utilities, Windows includes a file compress utility that uses the compressed .zip file format. Many attachment file formats can be reduced with the use of a compression utility. The amount of reduction will be minimal with some file formats that are already saved in a compressed format. For example, a Notepad .txt text file will reduce dramatically, while a .jpg image will not, because it has already been compressed. You can find more information about using file compression in Windows Help.
Contact: IT Helpdesk, (615) 343-9999