PowerUp!

Yesterday, we instituted some changes to email that a number of people haven’t particularly cared for. This is understandable, considering there haven’t been any limits on attachment sizes, daily bandwidth use, etc., except in a few rare cases. When you’ve been able to use a service unencumbered for such a long time, “limits” aren’t a great thing to have placed upon you.

Unfortunately, these changes have become a necessity. We understand that most of our users could be described as “typical” email users – you might send a larger attachment here and there. Some users have been using our mail service to send files 5+Mb and higher to multiple recipients. If, say, that email went to 20 recipients, that’s 100Mb worth of bandwidth that’s been used. If it went to a 1000 recipients, that’s 5,000Mb of bandwidth used. It adds up and that’s just ONE message being sent out by ONE user! Multiply that by a thousand or more and you’ll start to get a glimpse of the traffic our mail servers are getting on a daily basis.

When email is misused to send out large files to multiple recipients (and even transporting files to and from home) this causes a traffic jam of sorts for other users. That’s why we had to impose a cap of 2Mb on attachments, and a daily cap of 20Mb. People were exceeding this level all too often, and it was degrading the level of service for other customers.

So, where do we go from here? We’re looking at a couple of options right now, but we haven’t established a timeframe or the best course of action to take. We will be posting updates here to our blog and we’ll be emailing an announcement to all of our email users as soon as we make a decision on what to do next.

We appreciate your patience.

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