Solution on Exchange if possible...

[jjeffords]

A major performance vulnerability for all our clients is broadcast emails with large attachments. A single email with a large attachment is not much of a problem and a broadcast email with small size is not much of a problem, but large attachments to many people is a big problem. One of our clients i will call HGT is a great example of a company that needs to be able to send 20 MB files sometimes so we cannot limit the attachment size.

I have not been able to find any software to combat this problem and also allow users more flexibility. Ideally we need software to do an if/then calculation and restrictions will be based on the various results.

Example:
If the number of recipients exceeds 100 and the total message size is less than 200k then allow the message.
If the above is true, then begin delivery with a lower priority to other message traffic. Or schedule for night-time delivery.
If the total message size exceeds 3mb and the recipients are less than 10 then allow the message.

It would be great if we can find something to help with this.

 

[pbxman]

yikes - 20MB inbound? We use FTP for anything over 10MB. Mail servers aren't optimized for large file transfers in the first place. There's gotta be software like GFI's Mail Essentials suite of exchange products that can do something like that i'd think. Cant say for sure. I'd rather change the whole situation though and revisit your email policies.

pbxman
Systems Administrator

Please let Tek-Tips members know their posts were helpful.

 

[jjeffords]

Yea unfortunately these are political organizations and they want it their way or no way. haha Yea i hate it too. I came from an environment where we had limits on everything. I worked in a hospital and i had a policy for everything and never had troubles and handled more responsibility then now. But now it is so unstructured it gets frustrating at times. But makes for good experience having to adapt so much to so many different networks everyday. In case you were wondering the way i found was to dual Nic your server with a different connector for each and set up the policies accordingly. We have that set up and only the large transfers are late at night. Or mass mailings.

 

[nsantin]

Keep in mind that if you are receiving the attachment to 100 users that exchange only keeps 1 copy of the attachment and uses pointers on the rest of the e-mails. So you are not using any more bandwidth or storage space receiving 1 message with a 20mb attachment vs 100 messages with a 20mb attachment.

 

[Zelandakh]

And you get local expansion so that 20MB file only arrives once and gets blown out locally rather than delivered 100 times.