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Issue #213: August 21, 2011
Q: I have Window 7 Ultimate and Microsoft Outlook 2010. My sent box will have the same message twice – in other words I send a message and it duplicates the message. I’m told the recipient receives message only once but it clutters my sent box and trash box. Also, I can only attach 5 attachments to a message then it pops up saying I am attaching more than what is allowed. There must be a setting somewhere that this can be change.
– Judy G.
Monahans, Texas
A: You’re asking two questions, Judy – one about repeated messages in Outlook, and one about attachments. Let’s handle them one at a time, shall we? One thing you didn’t mention, but which is important in the context of your questions is that you are using Gmail as your e-mail provider. That’s a key part of the answer, because not all e-mail providers offer the same configuration options. The message duplication you’re experiencing is occurring because you have configured both Outlook and Gmail to save a copy of items you send. When you send an e-mail, Outlook stores a copy directly in its own Sent Mail folder on your local PC. The message gets sent to Gmail which also stores it in the Sent Mail folder on the Gmail server. You are almost surely using a mail exchange protocol called IMAP – Internet Message Access Protocol. (Caution! Geek info approaching!) IMAP differs from the old Post Office Protocol (POP3) in a couple of key ways. Where POP3 allows you to merely retrieve messages and optionally remove them from the server, IMAP actually synchronizes your e-mail client with your e-mail server. When your client connects to the server to update, IMAP notices the copy of the message that Gmail stored in the server’s Sent Mail folder, and, doing what it is supposed to do, it syncs a copy of it down to your local Sent Mail folder, where it joins the copy that Outlook put there. You’d have to log onto Gmail’s web interface to verify this, but I’m guessing it is also syncing the copy from your PC up to Gmail’s server, resulting in duplicates up there also. You can fix this by turning off either Gmail’s or Outlook’s feature to save a message to Sent Mail. I recommend turning it off in Outlook. That way, if you use Gmail’s webmail interface, the Sent Mail folder will contain the messages you expect it to contain, and any mail you send from the Webmail interface will still synchronize down to your local PC the next time you run Outlook.
For your other question, I don’t think it’s the actual count of attachments that’s limiting you, but their combined size. Typically, e-mail providers limit the maximum size of attachments to between 5 and 25 megabytes. Anything larger and it would provide a perfect attack vector for someone to perform a denial-of-service attack by just repeatedly sending large e-mails to overwhelm someone’s server. Gmail supports messages up to 25 megabytes, but Outlook 2010 has been set up to limit e-mails to 20 megabytes. If you exceed this, Outlook pops-up the message “The attachment size exceeds the allowable limit.” which I presume is the actual error text you’re getting. It’s not necessarily telling you that you have too many attachments, just that their combined size is too large. For some reason, Microsoft chose not to put a control on Outlook’s configuration menu to change this limit (Thanks, Bill!). Perhaps that’s because 20 megabytes is a pretty fair sized e-mail, and larger ones are likely to be bounced by the recipient’s server, and will need to be broken up into smaller messages and re-sent anyway. However, if you absolutely insist on sending larger messages, the limit can be changed if you’re willing to take that dangerous foray into your Windows registry. The instructions on how to make this adjustment can be found here: tinyurl.com/2buy95g
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