Administration

Penn State increases maximum email size

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The maximum size of an email sent through Penn State’s email system has been increased from 20 MB to 25 MB. The increase matches the allotment offered by some other email providers and will enable students, faculty and staff members to send much larger email messages than before.

Most email providers set a maximum amount of data their users can send or receive in a single email as a way to control mailbox sizes, guarantee service availability, and protect the network from potential attacks designed to flood the email system with useless traffic.

The new 25 MB limit is sufficient for attaching text documents and other small files to an email message and is applied to the sum of the message’s text and file attachments. In other words, the attachments and email text combined can’t add up to more than 25 MB. Messages exceeding the 25 MB limit that are being sent to Penn State email accounts will bounce back to the sender. Likewise, messages larger than 25 MB that are sent from Penn State email accounts will yield an error.  

Files larger than 25 MB can be shared through the University’s cloud-based file sharing and storage service, Box.

For more information about Penn State email, visit the Penn State Help Request Portal (link requires Web Access). 

Last Updated February 21, 2017