I saw a customer that was having many problems with sending emails.

Sometimes the emails would sit in the outbox for hours, until they get deleted.

I looked at many options, and could only see a problem with MS outlook: the automatic send/receive was scheduled to run every minute, rather than every 10 minutes. I changed it to every 15 minutes, as some of the attachments were quite large.

I didn’t realise at first, but I eventually realised that the attachments were quite large.

Given the nature of ADSL, receiving is much faster than sending… so while ADSL1 can receive at about 1.5Mb per minute, it can only send at 0.5 Mb per minute. While ADSL2+ can receive up to 22Mb per minute, it can only send at 1Mb per minute.

This is great for surfing the net (and receiving emails), as most of the traffic is in-coming.

But when you try sending emails, you are limited to 1Mb per minute… so a 22Mb file (which is very quick to copy onto a USB drive), will take at least 22 minutes to send… a 60Mb file will take at least 1 hour.

In this case, the customer had file that varied between 7Mb and 300Mb… all quite large for email… particularly when most ISPs will time-out an email, it it take longer than 30 minutes to send.

So what are the alterntives?

• A remove internet drive (like dropbox). You get no email timeouts, but can still only send at 1MB per minute. Plus the person at the other end also needs to install the dropbox software… its all a bit clumsy, but can work well if you need to send large files to many people.
• Write a CD / DVD and post it… a CD can store 700 Mb, a DVD can store 4,500 Mb (ie 4.5 Gb)… This is easily the cheapest solution, but it can take some time to “burn” each CD.
• write to a USB drive and post it, or take it with you to transfer to another PC. USB drives can store up to 32Gb, are quite quick, but are small and easy (and costly) to lose.