A lot of the attendees from AICPA Tech+ were kind enough to take the time and filled out a survey for us during the exhibition. We wanted to utilize the opportunity we had with our community to try to gain a better understanding on what each and every user is looking for so we can continue to develop and improve.

Here are some of the results we got:

To continue from my previous posts, here are the last two reasons why email isn't the best way to send large, confidential files.

In my previous post, I suggested five reasons why email is not the best conduit for tranferring large or confidential documents. These reasons are:

With data privacy and security high on corporate IT's mind, every security consultant, solutions provider and blogger is coming out with a top 5 or top 10 in how to deal with this critical issue. It would not surprise me if David Letterman came out with his own Top 10 List (okay, maybe I would be a tad surprised). 

In today's global business environment, email may be the most critical communication tool for a company. Countless messages are fired off worldwide everyday, and while the emails containing just text usually find their destination, things aren't so certain for emails carrying attachments. File-size caps, server hiccups, spam filters – all of these can derail an email as it tries to reach its destination.

A recent article was published on USA Today that covered a well-known vendor for file transfer services and also mentioned several others within this space. Obviously, I read this with great interest, but was initially dismayed that LeapFILE was not even mentioned, even though I had a quick chat with the reporter who wrote this article when he was doing his research.

10 MB or less is generally considered a good size limit for email servers.   Increasing the limit beyond this can make the server unreliable or vulnerable to attacks for the reasons listed below. 

In many cases, because your email client (a program such as Outlook) does not communicate with the server about the size of the file, the whole email including the attachment will be sent, which can take a long time, and then the server will ‘bounce’ the email, sending the whole email back to you along with a message saying the email is too big to send! 

Firstly, in order to complete a delivery, your recipient’s email server has to have the same capability to receive it. Even if you set your server to have a 20 MB limit, your 15 MB email can’t be delivered if your recipient has a server with a size limit of 10 MB.

Secondly, big size files may crash the email server. Size limits are also needed to avoid malicious users sending very large files in order to crash the server.  They also reduce the amount of disk space needed to store the email messages on the server.

When you send an email with an attachment, there are two types of size limit that can cause your email to bounce back as “undeliverable” – the message size limit of both the sender’s and recipient’s email servers, and the size limit of the recipient’s inbox.