In my previous post, I suggested five reasons why email is not the best conduit for tranferring large or confidential documents. These reasons are:

#1:   Email can’t support large file attachments
#2:   Updating email infrastructure can wreck IT budgets
#3:   Large files mean slow systems
#4:   Email systems aren’t secure enough
#5:   Email transfer is unreliable, untraceable, and can’t be guaranteed

Reason #2: Updating email infrastructure can wreck IT budgets

1. The IT department increases its active monitoring of the mail storage server, addressing issues and contacting appropriate employees when problems arise. Because business is a 24/7 global environment today, this requires continuous observation and analysis, pulling valuable resources away from other core tasks for troubleshooting, problem solving, and monitoring.
2. The IT department can spend more to upgrade hardware for increased mail storage requirements. However, a complete restructuring of email infrastructure comes with its own budget-busting price tag. The following table is a typical breakdown of hardware/software costs to support a Microsoft Exchange mailbox system:

That cost doesn’t include other additional security options, such as encryption and notification/tracking.

Any way you look at the numbers, there's no getting around the fact that an entire infrastructure upgrade will be costly. Even when it gets up and running, the problems from Reason #1 will continue to accumulate over time.
 

Reason #3: Large files mean slow systems

Picture a three-lane highway with cars and trucks moving along at a fast pace. Now imagine what happens if an oversized truck barrels down the highway, taking up two lanes while flashing emergency lights. The whole freeway slows down; in some areas, traffic will totally stop until the truck passes by. Why? Because the infrastructure can't support something that large without disrupting the regular flow of traffic.

In that scenario, cars and trucks are regular emails and that oversized truck is a large attachment being sent through the email server. Email servers aren't designed to handle large file transfers, and the process of delivering those files slows down network traffic. In a best-case scenario, things temporarily slow down while the large file moves from Inbox A to Inbox B. In a worst-case scenario, the infrastructure can't handle the overload and the email server crashes. Imagine the likelihood and the risk of this happening in medium or large corporations with hundreds if not thousands of users, where mail servers are handling numerous message transactions at any given point in time.

There's a reason why email systems have a cap on file sizes. Simply put, email servers weren't meant to be file-transfer conduits. File-size limits are meant to ensure that the infrastructure never encounters anything it can't handle. These limits can be one of the most frustrating issues facing end users. With files increasing in size as applications become more advanced and complicated, the file-size safeguard becomes a hindrance to day-to-day business users, slowing down communication – or even grinding it to a halt.

Please stay tuned for the remaining reasons why you shouldn't use email for file transfer.