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What is Email Capacity and why do we need them?

Email capacity is the limit an email account can receive incoming and outgoing email.

Why there is an email cap is mainly for security reasons. All email server providers limit the maximum email size that an email account can receive. Otherwise, if there would be no maximum email size limit, the email server would risk to be bombarded with very large emails, causing it to cease working properly.

What happens when the incoming email is larger than the email capacity?

The incoming email will not be successfully delivered if the incoming email size is more/larger than the maximum email capacity. The sender will receive one of the following errors (i.e. a bounced email)
“Attachment size exceeds the allowable limit”

“552: Message size exceeds maximum permitted”

“System Undeliverable, message size exceeds outgoing message size limit”

“The size of the message you are trying to send exceeds the global size limit of the server. The message was not sent; reduce the message size and try again”

How about outgoing email?

For outgoing emails, it depends on the recipient’s capacity, for most email domains, it is limited to 20MB, and for some government bodies it may be limited to 10MB.

Here’s a guide of some of the email caps of some email domains

For further information:

https://www.outlook-apps.com/maximum-email-size/