Some of you may have noticed that we recently implemented a size limit for attachments in email broadcasts and follow-up sequence emails. A few customers have made us aware of the fact that we didn’t inform you of this change effectively and that we failed to analyze the impact on your business and user experience. As someone who is charged with discussing product management with customers, I’d like to address this for you in this entry.
First, we apologize for making such a change without giving you sufficient time to make changes. To redeem ourselves and to help entrepreneurs grow their business, we are temporarily removing the limitation for 30 days so that you can make the appropriate adjustments to handle the attachment file size limit of 100k.
You might wonder why we would make such a decision that seems to limit our users’ ability to effectively market their business. The reason is actually twofold: Increased Deliverability and Performance Reliability.
One of the primary reasons for not sending attachments via email is because the existence of the attachment is likely to trigger the spam filtering, virus detection programs on the other end or your email would most likely land in the SPAM or JUNK Mail folder instead of the INBOX. You will actually increase your deliverability by hosting your files on your own server or through a 3rd party file hosting application, then inserting links to the file(s) into your email templates. If you don’t know how to upload files to your server, it’s OK. Here are a couple free online hosting applications you can use to host and share your files: YouSendIt (100MB), QuickFiles (300MB) or TransferBigFiles (1GB).
An additional reason we limited the size limits on attachments is recipients may not open them. In fact, arguably they shouldn’t, for fear their computer could be compromised and that instead of you sending them a file, it’s a virus that is sending itself out in your name.
Ultimately, if customers conduct a large email campaign, large attachments eat up a lot of system resources. Imagine it now, you send to a list size of 5000 people a 5MB attachment, the system is now strained by more than 2500GB of ‘dead’ bandwidth, memory and CPU cycles. You don’t want that, you want to be efficient, quick and clean.
In addition to the excellent reasons already stated, the recipient email clients also do not like to process large attachments. It is better to link to a file for download to save system resources for both the sender and the recipient. For large attachments where performance matters, you might want to consider Amazon S3, to take advantage of a global CDN.
In the end, we had the right intentions; unfortunately, the flaw was in our lack of communication and education as to how you can continue to provide your prospects and customers with the information they need and access to large files. I can tell you that’s a lesson well learned!
Check out the article on our Fusebox to learn more about how to host your own files, using a hosting & sharing application and how to place file links in your email.
In the end analysis, there is some good and bad here. Here’s what I believe you should do (to satisfy both parties.) I’m fine with disallowing attachments greater than, say, 1MB or 2MB in campaigns. But I need SOMETHING. I also want to be able to attach files in TEMPLATES while within the email applet. I have a group of emails in a category called “On the phone.” And .. depending on what we’re talking about.. I send them an email with a bunch of attachments and they say “Great. Which one should I open first?” If you kill my ability to do that.. my prospect then has to.. (1) Click on a link. (2) Save. (3) Find the file (ughhh..) then (4) open it. and (5) Remember where the thing was. So, my proposal is simple: Go ahead.. eliminate it from “true blasts” (whatever that means to you.) But leave it on for campaigns, activity history templates, and the email app.
I agree with Jeremy, I understand the reasoning and am cool with that, but 100k seems a little ‘hard core’
This limits our ability to email efficiently SO much. 100kb? Files haven't been that small since 1995.