I recently finished a graduate assistantship at a state risk management
office.  They too had limits to attachment sizes, but they also had an
aggressive digitization/scanning operation.  Because risk management deals
with insurance files, these can become quite large and even when broken into
smaller pieces, the file pieces can still be large and over 5MB when
scanned.  This office, for some reason, did not allow flash/jump drives, so
we had to oftentimes scan a file that turned out to be more than 5MB in size
and save it to a CD, which then was sent to another office (for instance,
Attorney General).  The other offices wanted the files emailed, not
couriered to them on a CD.  But there was nothing they could do about it.

Throughout my tenure there, I felt it was a disservice to clients and to
other agencies and offices to have a limit on file size for attachments.  I
use some internet-based email clients that will allow a 20MB attachment to
go through and also wondered how a state-of-the-art facility could have a
policy in place that limited file attachment sizes when there was a clear
indication that some legitimate files were large by nature.  

I won't even go into the hair-pulling instances of scanning color photos as
part of these files!

The size of folders were also an issue here, but we found early on that if
we properly trained the personnel to filter emails received to personal
folders, there were no problems. I believe the mailbox limit was 100MB and
this posed a problem when you were sent ten or more emails from someone with
color photographs that themselves were 1MB or more.  But when the filters
were set up and a received email could be saved into a personal folder for
"supervisor," "manager," "client x," "client y," etc., it really solved the
problem.  But the personnel had to be trained and this did take some time.
Now at least some of the insurance adjusters in the office rarely have
anything in their "inbox," but have instead created a large number of
"inboxes" for each type of email received (client, supervisor, etc.).  This
was a fix to the problem and I'm sure will be written into the email policy
for the office, if it has not already been.


Russell D. James, MA, MLIS
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