Max Mail Size

[Matt]

I have recently had users try to send rather large emails through AMS which are not accepted by the receiving SMTP server due to the mail size, but the ability mail server keeps trying every ten minutes for 3 hours tying up needed bandwidth. In this situation why does ability mail server not stop trying to send after the first email and immediately send a failure notice?

Under the "General" settings in AMS I have set the max mail size to 100MB. From what I understand this is the max mail size for both incoming and outgoing emails. I have a few groups setup, and I set the max mail size under the "Group" setting at 10MB. This effectively caps the incoming email size for those groups at 10MB and under. When a user in that same group sends an email they are able to send emails that are larger than 10MB. Under the "Group" settings does the max mail size only apply to incoming email sizes?

Do both "max mail size" settings apply to both incoming and outgoing emails, or have I misunderstood the online help?

[rob]

Please find my answer in your Inbox.

[Matt]

I have posted Rob's response below for anyone else who may have had the same question. Thank You Rob for your reply.
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Hi,

Presently the outgoing mail system treats all mails equally, regardless of size. In the future we do plan to tune the outgoing mail service so that it prioritises mails accordingly and so the size of a mail will effect how frequent it attempts to resend. However, the only real way to avoid large mails hogging the system would be to reduce the queue life and resend attempts so that all mails are only tried a few times (perhaps a queue life of 24 hours and resend attempts that are 7 hours, which will mean only 4 attempts in those 24 hours).

As to the group maximum mail setting, this only affects incoming mails which are stored in the users account. Sending mails is limited by only the general settings, and so to prevent massive mails being delivered, you would need to adjust the general option. The reason why group settings don’t effect sent mail is because there is no guarantee that a user will login into the SMTP (the only real way to be sure which user it is), and so the mail server cannot guarantee consistent enforcing of the limit (if a user uses POP Before SMTP, then they would avoid the limitation basically).

Hope this helps,

Rob
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