Outlook Large Attachment issue

hkabik
Valued Contributor

Has anyone seen and/or possibly have a fix for the following?

We have has several instances of folks attaching ridiculously large files to emails and attempting to send them. 20, 30, 50 MB and up.

These will of course fail, but they will keep recycling the attempt over and over and over and if enough folks do it at once it can really monopolize the bandwidth of some of our satellite offices.

Is there ANY way of limiting the size of attachments at a client level? Or tell Outlook to stop the resend attempts after a certain point?

This issue seems to be present in both 2011 and 2016.

4 REPLIES 4

AVmcclint
Honored Contributor

I encountered an instance yesterday where a user thought he was attaching a 230KB file but it ended up being 230MB and it made Outlook 2011 hang forever - even after quitting the app and relaunching it. I tried locating the file inside any of the Microsoft User Data folders or even any of the cache or tmp folders on the drive or in ~/, but we couldn't locate it to delete just that. Even trying to repair the Office Database failed to fix it. The only way we could restore functionality was to delete the entire Identity folder and setup the mail account again. Luckily this user's mailbox was about 1 GB total so it didn't take terribly long to rebuild it on the LAN. If the user was remote, we would have been in a world of pain.

dgreening
Valued Contributor II

I have found that you can often delete stuck messages in Outlook webmail...

hkabik
Valued Contributor

It's easy enough to delete the messages in Outllook, just go offline and it will show the outgoing folder and delete it from there.

The problem is stopping it from occurring and manhandling our bandwidth in the first place.

hkabik
Valued Contributor

So it appears in 2016 after about 7 attempts it will error out and throws the email into the drafts folder on your mac (not exchange) instead of your outbox. This is good, very good.

Unfortunately we are 99% still on 2011 and it just tries and tries and tries on 2011.