Mail Capacity Issues and...

Well three months after switching I still have a few little irritating issues to solve. I work from home, primarily with images and need to send large(ish) files to various people. First of all I find the mail delivery on my iMac horrendously slow, even with smaller files, but today I tried to send a 14 MB pdf, not that large by most standards and certainly within the limits of AOL, and yet I got one of those 552 Exceeded Capacity error messages? I had to go back and save every image at a smaller pixel dimension and then resave the PDF file to 4 MB, which went (albiet slowly.) Since there was a chance that some of this material would have to be printed out, I would have preferred to have sent the larger file, but 'twas not to be.

Has anyone else found a problem with emailing larger attachments and if so and found the answer, what am I missing please?

PS - You are all so wonderful at coming up with all the right answers ;D

Don't believe it has anything to do with the Mail app.

AOL's file attachment limit is 16MB (edit: actually this is limit for size of e-mail including text, headers, attachments,etc.), so that single file was hitting close to the limit they allow. They suggest you either compress the file or split it into smaller parts.

The sending speed is going to be more reliant on bandwidth from your ISP, than anything within Mail. We don't know what it is you mean by "slowly". 10 seconds? 20? 2 minutes? At the upload speeds most of us have, it would not be out of the ordinary for it to take 10-20 seconds to send a 4MB file.

(There is also no reason to need to sit and watch it until it's been sent. Although I did the same last night sending 6 MB's in 3 pics to someone. Click the send button and go on about the rest of your work.)

OK - My pdf's are Photoshop generated so I will have to investigate the compression option. Splitting the file might cause it to lose some of it's professional appearance. Not that the file itself would have a problem, but the client does not usually expect a presentation split into two, and unfortunately they do not all have FTP capabilities. I did not actually time the upload, and it is possible that what seems like "forever" might in fact not be that long in the real world, so I shall literally time it (them) the next time around.
Thank you very much. I shall try to find a solution and keep experimenting with assorted file sizes until I find out the absolute maximum that can be handled.
Thank again.

Particularly if these are for business presentations, and you find that it is fairly often you need to send larger files, you might want to check out StuffIt Deluxe. It will zip your pdfs and other image files and fully compatible with your Windows users to be able to unzip them.

files

If you have mobileme membership, put your files in the public folder (zip if multiple) and click to share on the site, then you just have to add the email address and mobile me will do the rest

And Leopard has a compress function built in - right click on a file and select compress