Ask HN: Why there is an attachment limit of 25mb on gmail?

Posted by skbohra123 on Saturday October 16, 2010 @12:54AM
from the ask-hn dept.

What's stopping them from making it large? Storage must not be any issue for Google, ofcourse. What point I am missing ?

( 3 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Why there is an attachment limit of 25mb on gmail? by richardw on Saturday October 16, 2010 @03:45AM (#1797563)

SMTP is pretty inefficient, especially with binary files, so a 25MB file could be quite a bit bigger during transmission. Add to that being able to send to many email addresses and GMail could end up sending out e.g. 1GB for a single mail, even though the stored value is 25MB.

Frankly, I'd be a bit irritated if people started sending me 100MB files via email. Put it up on a server and let people download it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Why there is an attachment limit of 25mb on gmail? by punnned on Saturday October 16, 2010 @02:51AM (#1797508)

Gmail is free. Storage costs money to maintain. 25mb limit per email + 7.5gig free 'storage' ain't bad.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Why there is an attachment limit of 25mb on gmail? by egonzalez on Saturday October 16, 2010 @01:38AM (#1797432)

Probably so that people continue using it as email and not as a file transferring service ?

[ Parent | on HN ]