Only recently we reported in this NewsHub that even 44 years after its invention email still enjoys immense popularity and especially during this age of social media is increasingly serving as a channel for universal communication. In practice this means that users now expect and require much more from email as a medium than just the reliable and timely delivery of their message to the recipient. A message has to reach its recipient virtually anywhere and on every kind of device. And what’s more, huge video files, pictures or presentations should preferably be delivered just as quickly and easily.
Big file attachments, big problems
But it’s coping with these huge amounts of data which is causing many providers headaches. At the end of the day, even the largest PowerPoint presentation needs to be dependably processed and saved. In this case, for once the fears of IT administrators match those of users. Private users are seldom pleased to suddenly discover email attachments of several megabytes on their smartphones, while providers and companies justifiably fear that their internal email architecture will be overloaded by “mega mails” – a drawback that large file attachments share with spam messages. At the same time, this problem can’t be solved by simply blocking and filtering out email messages larger than a certain size without a comment. This is hardly compatible with today’s expectation that email should serve as a universal means of communication.
Large E-Mail Handling: quarantine instead of deleting
This means that a solution is required which fulfills the needs of users and IT administrators alike. While this sounds complicated, at Retarus the solution is surprisingly simple: Retarus Large E-Mail Handling treats emails containing large attachments in virtually the same way as emails suspected of being spam messages. The only difference is that in this case IT administrators set upper limits for the size of the attachments to be delivered directly to the inbox. All messages containing files which exceed the limit are not simply blocked without comment, but – as in the case of suspected spam messages – placed in quarantine. The recipient immediately receives an email notification that a large message has been stored, including the subject and content, and can download the entire message directly – or choose to only download the message when he or she is back in the office onto the PC hard drive, so the attachment won’t overload the data volume or the storage on his or her mobile phone. At the end of the day, this not only pleases administrators, but also users. Because not having to worry about either spam or bulky file attachments, means that users will once again be able to fully enjoy email as a universal means of communication.
