Entourage EWS Attachment Limits

We've been wrestling through an Entourage attachment-size issue that's been maddening. Today we finally got to work with Microsoft's Product Support Services technical lead. He and his colleague were helpful, and we got through it, but it took more than an hour! It was about as straight-forward as San Francisco's Lombard Street, but here's what we learned:

• Entourage file attachment limitations are managed by the Exchange 2007 server in the EWS folder.
• There's no easy-to-use checkbox to say someone has no limitation on attachment file size.
• Assuming that when you don't impose an attachment size limitation on a user-- presumably because you don't want there to be a limitation on their attachment sizes-- is enough won't work. Exchange applies its default limitation of 5mb!
• When setting a higher limit to allow someone to send attachments larger than 5mb, don't base the new limit on the actual size of the attachment files. Mime will expand attachments about 1/3 larger than their original file size. But don't base the new limit on that size either, because Exchange expands the attachments even larger! Set the limit to about double the original attachments' file size.

Many Mac users work on media files. While email isn't the best way to send large files, some will want to quickly send large (25-50mb) attachments. Microsoft will be wise to simplify this process.