Attachment limit

Question

I was wondering how you increase you attachment limit in Mail. I have a .Mac account and I thought it had something to do with that but now I am confused. I hate having to send more than one e-mail to friends to send them multiple attachments. I guess I could just send a link to my public folder with iDisk. Can anyone access my public folder given the password whether they are on a PC or Mac. Not many of my friends have a Mac.

Answer 1

This is determined by the email account provider for the account - your ISP if the email account is provided by your ISP or in this case, .Mac.
A .Mac account has a 10 MB overall message size limit for received and sent messages which is a common limit now but some providers still have a smaller limit.
If your email account provider has a larger overall message size limit for sending messages but the recipient has a smaller limit, the message will be rejected by the recipient's incoming mail server so you must take the recipient's incoming mail server overall message size limit into consideration.
Message attachments must be encoded before being sent and decoded when recieved. The Mail.app uses MIME 1.0 for attachment encoding/decoding which is the internet standard. The problem with MIME is it isn't very efficient. The encoding process increases the size of the pre-encoded file by roughly 50% or so. An 8 MB file pre-encoded will be roughly 12 MB in size after the encoding process placing the overall size of the message over the 10 MB limit not taking any message text into account.
With Hotmail you can just order more space to e-mail files.
Can you not do this with Mac Mail?
On a per message basis?
Not with any email client such as the Mail.app which wouldn't make any difference anyway since the overall message size limit for received and sent messages is determined by the email account provider for the sender and recipient.
Can anyone access my public folder given the password whether
they are on a PC or Mac. Not many of my friends have a Mac.
Yes.
If you're a .Mac member, you can allow other users to add or remove files from your iDisk Public folder by assigning read-write access to your folder. Assigning read-write access to your Public folder doesn't affect the other folders on your iDisk.
IMPORTANT: If you assign read-write access to your Public folder, it's a good idea to password-protect it.
To assign read-write access to your Public folder:
Open System Preferences and click .Mac.
Click iDisk, and then click the Read & Write button.
Your available iDisk storage is affected each time someone adds or removes a file from your Public folder.
For Mac users:
You can open another .Mac member's Public folder to see and copy files. If the member has set access privileges to read-write, you can also add and remove files.
To access another person's Public folder, you need to know their member name and their Public folder password (if they use one to protect the folder).
To open someone's Public folder:
Choose Go > iDisk > Other User's Public Folder.
Type the member name of the person whose Public folder you want to open in the Member Name field.
Click Connect.
If a password is required, type it in the Password field and click OK.
The person's Public folder opens on your desktop.
For Windows Users:
If you're using your iDisk to share files with Windows users, they need the following information to see and copy files in your Public folder.
Windows users can open your iDisk using Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000, or Windows 98.
To access your Public folder, the Windows user needs to know your member name and Public folder password (if your Public folder is password-protected).
To open someone's Public folder using Windows:
If you're using Windows XP, use iDisk Utility for Windows to open someone's Public folder. To download iDisk Utility for Windows, go to www.mac.com, and click "iDisk Utility for Windows XP."
If you're using Windows 2000, open My Computer, choose Map Network Drive from the Tools menu, then click "Web folder or FTP site." Enter the following as the location to add: http://idisk.mac.com/membername-Public? (where "membername" is the other person's .Mac member name).
If you're using Windows 98, open My Computer, double-click the Web Folders icon, then double-click Add Web Folder. Enter the following as the location to add: http://idisk.mac.com/membername-Public? (where "membername" is the other person's .Mac member name).
You can also use HomePage to create a file sharing page.