internet company cannot send 3MB email attachments, wtf?

[JimKiler]

I work for an internet company and we have over $100 million in annual revenue. Anyway they sent an email out stating they could no longer email the cafeteria menu to all employees since the 3MB attachment is too large for our exchange servers which are running out of space.

I have personally sent attachments in our email that are over 20MB all the time. So the solution to this issue is for them to put the menu in the cafeteria and stop sending out the weekly menu.

How incompentent does that make my company look?

I actually talked to the VP of IT and called him on this and he said the servers are full and until we get to exchange 2010 and force 2GB mailbox limits there is no room. Today we have lots of employees using their mailbox as their archive instead of creating an archive file on their local PC.

I asked him why they could not send out a text file with the menu or a link to the internal website with the menu. He did not really answer that question. I cannot believe the VP lets his own employees get away with being lazy and not coming up with a proepr solution to the server space issue.

 

[Ken g6]

 

[Gunslinger08]

Why doesn't your $100 million company have an intranet? You shouldn't be emailing the same weekly/monthly file to hundreds of internal users.

 

[olds]

Our limit at work is 1 GB. I have a PowerPoint that is 1.02 GB that I need to send to a co-worker in another city. Burn a DVD it is...

 

[kranky]

The company doesn't look incompetent, just the poor schmuck who can't figure out how to represent a weekly menu in an attachment that is a fraction of 3MB.

 

[Gunslinger08]

Sounds like you do have an intranet and your management is just dumb. Not much you can do about that. It's amazing that companies can get so big with such terrible processes and organization.

 

[DrPizza]

Wow, how many levels of fail is this?

 

[lxskllr]

The company doesn't look incompetent, just the poor schmuck who can't figure out how to represent a weekly menu in an attachment that is a fraction of 3MB.

That's what I'm trying to figure out. I have some moderately sized PDF ebooks that are smaller than that. It must be a full multimedia menu, with audio, and animation :^D

 

[Jeff7]

Our limit at work is 1 GB. I have a PowerPoint that is 1.02 GB that I need to send to a co-worker in another city. Burn a DVD it is...

WinRAR.
Split file into multiple pieces.
Send.

 

[rcpratt]

Post it...on...the intranet.

 

[Matthiasa]

Our limit at work is 1 GB. I have a PowerPoint that is 1.02 GB that I need to send to a co-worker in another city. Burn a DVD it is...

How does one manage to get a 1GB power point?

 

[olds]

WinRAR.
Split file into multiple pieces.
Send.

No WinRAR. No IT support.
In fact, some of the video in the file I had to convert from .flv to .wmv. I did it at home with free software. But to do it at work, I have to purchase Adobe Premier, the full version for $400. Our IT only supports Premier.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Our limit at work is 1 GB. I have a PowerPoint that is 1.02 GB that I need to send to a co-worker in another city. Burn a DVD it is...

Just a suggestion...

 

[olds]

How does one manage to get a 1GB power point?

Videos

Just a suggestion...

Blocked at work. All file sharing is.
I have a host but I am capped at 2 GB and have used most of that. Getting ready to switch to Hostgator though.

 

[911paramedic]

You really email that menu to everybody? lol

 

[Red Squirrel]

lol it's sad but true.

I've given up trying to overcomplicate things and I just make an account on my online server, have them SFTP the file to it and I get it, or vise versa. If the company complains and does not like it then they should provide me a way to do it. I don't do this for highly confidential data though, but for stuff like a vendor trying to send us a patch or something, I don't see it as a big deal.

 

[wiredspider]

Well I could see the problem with everyone in the company getting the same 3MB attachment and never deleting it, just sitting in their inbox on the server forever... Though seems like they could just send a link to view it online or text only.

So other 3MB+ attachments are still allowed right? Seems like the menu distribution was just rather inefficient to begin with ...

 

[Anubis]

Wow, how many levels of fail is this?

over 9000


seriously just host it internally and link to it

 

[Jeff7]

That's what I'm trying to figure out. I have some moderately sized PDF ebooks that are smaller than that. It must be a full multimedia menu, with audio, and animation :^D

Other options:
- Scanned and plopped right into a PDF. (Bonus points if they've embedded a bitmap.)
- Saved at 4000dpi, using stroked text instead of a font.
- The pictures haven't been downsampled when the document was saved.
- If it's PDF, the document software doesn't support any kind of compression. Adobe Acrobat Professional has a nice Reduce File Size feature, which can give some good results, depending of course on the content of the file.

lol it's sad but true.

I've given up trying to overcomplicate things and I just make an account on my online server, have them SFTP the file to it and I get it, or vise versa. If the company complains and does not like it then they should provide me a way to do it. I don't do this for highly confidential data though, but for stuff like a vendor trying to send us a patch or something, I don't see it as a big deal.

If you mail someone a 3TB drive full of data, and it takes 3 full days to get there, that's a transfer rate of 11,574,074 bytes per second.

I think I'm going to start a new ISP. I'll do 2-day shipping on 10-packs of 3TB hard drives.
The pingtimes are terrible, but the net transfer rates are amazing.

 

[Ichinisan]

...
seriously just host it internally and link to it

This. Always should have been done this way unless it a basic email with text and images < 1MB.

 

[lxskllr]

If you mail someone a 3TB drive full of data, and it takes 3 full days to get there, that's a transfer rate of 11,574,074 bytes per second.

I think I'm going to start a new ISP. I'll do 2-day shipping on 10-packs of 3TB hard drives.
The pingtimes are terrible, but the net transfer rates are amazing.

There's companies that do that. I read about it awhile ago, but I can't remember the details. It really sounds stupid when you talk about it, but given the state of our network capability, it makes sense.

 

[Red Squirrel]

over 9000


seriously just host it internally and link to it

Easier said than done. You have to setup a server/VM or w/e, put the file on it, then have the network guys forward the port to it. You will need to rip through so much red tape just to do this. It's really sad when you think about it but that's what it is.

Unless upper management thinks you need it, chances are you wont get it.

 

[tfinch2]

On the same level as a technology forum that goes down for maintenance every week.

 

[Red Squirrel]

On the same level as a technology forum that goes down for maintenance every week.

LOL burn.

 

[JimKiler]

I think they do not post it on the intranet because that would make sense. The same reason they do not send it as a plain text email.

The funny thing is it is a PDF file they are sending. Even weirder is that the last day's menu is not fully readable unless you print it out. How hard is it to do something the right way?

My coworkers who all get how stupid this makes our company sounds are amused that I went to the VP of IT to complain about this.

It is like our old business analyst used to say to our developers, the issue is one of two things: 1. you are incompetent or 2. the system is bloated crap. Seeing how we are only talking about intranet and email and I could send out the menu correctly and I am in accounting therefore i choose with answer #1.