cPanel Email Attachment Size Limit

Email Attachment Size Limit

Technically, our Shared servers have a 50 MB limit on the size of outgoing e-mails (which includes the email body and attachments) sent via webmail but, in reality, there are a number of factors that determine how large of a file attachment you may successfully send. These factors include:

• The fact that your attachment is MIME encoded, which causes the size to swell up to 40%.  So a 35 MB file on your hard drive will take up approx. 50 MB of space when MIME encoded for sending as an attachment. A 23 MB file on your hard drive will take up approx. 30 MB when MIME encoded.
• Any limits your email client has on attachments, which may vary from email client to email client (for example, iManila Webmail’s limit is 50 MB, while Outlook 2010’s limit is 20 MB).
• Any limits the recipient’s server has on email attachment size, which also vary from email service provider to email service provider (for example, Gmail, Yahoo! & Hotmail all have a 25 MB limit).
• Any limits the recipient’s email client may have on attachment size.
• The amount of free space available in the recipient’s e-mail account, if their mailbox has a size limit. (If their mailbox is full, your message will be rejected.)
• How reliable your internal service provider (ISP) is at sending large files without corrupting them or aborting.

As you can see, there are many factors that can affect how large an attachment can be.  You may even encounter situations where you send an identical attachment to two people, and one receives it, and the other does not.  That is usually caused by one recipient’s server rejecting the attachment for being too large, and the other one accepting it.

If you need to share large files with your recipient, we recommend that you upload the file(s) to any other file sharing service first like Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. Then, you can email your recipient the link (URL) where they can access/download the file(s). This allows you to share all sizes of files without clogging up inboxes or running into size limits.