Maximum number of attachments in E-Mail

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Is there an upper limit on the number of attachments one can send in a single e-mail message? I am coding an application to act as an e-mail forwarding service which receives delivery requests and stores them in a database for later dispatching, and it would come in very handy if I knew beforehand that sending more than, say, 32 attachments is not supported by the e-mail protocols. Is there any such limit?

DotNetStudent

Posted 2011-11-10T10:51:42.130

Reputation: 121

What client are you useing to send emails? – ben950 – 2011-11-10T11:00:06.667

It will be a given SMTP server about which I know nothing at this point. – DotNetStudent – 2011-11-10T11:03:12.130

I know that there is a list of RFCs which talk about things such as maximum length of e-mail addresses and so on, but I can't remember the number right now. I'm sure that they would be the correct place to look for canonical answer. – AndrejaKo – 2011-11-10T11:07:46.533

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If I'm reading the FRC 5321 correctly (section 4.5.3.1.7. seems relevant), then there should be no limit to number of attachments in an e-mail. Any limit should be only imposed by implementation.

– AndrejaKo – 2011-11-10T11:20:04.257

1True, but the majority of ISP's have their own interpretation of this as they each have their own spam servers... I'm suffering from one at the moment who has set a (low) limit to the number of emails you can receive in an hour... ARGH! – HaydnWVN – 2011-11-10T12:08:39.547

Answers

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As @AndrejaKo identifies rfc5321 states there should be no limit to the number of attachments in theory but implementations may vary as @HaydnWVN points out. More likely to hit the limit for the email size (e.g. Virgin Media will return emails larger than 20MB and GMail limit is 25MB)

xylar

Posted 2011-11-10T10:51:42.130

Reputation: 1 193

Asked: 2011-11-10T10:51:42.130

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Active: 2013-04-10T13:31:42.870