Yup. Seems crazy to me but then I dont know much about in-house mail servers and their benefits. I guess more control etc but it seems no one really considered the remote users. The majority of users are in the same building as the server so I guess they'll be OK.

So back to my original question, as just looking for a few opinions from people more in the know than me...what upload speed would you think a local mail server would need for the usage I have described? My uneducated gut feeling was around 2Mb minimum.

Edited by deleted (Fri 14-Jun-13 17:35:56)

The joy of virtual servers means you can remote admin a server as well remotely in a data centre as a you can in an office.

if anything the virtual server is easier as can be potentially accessed by people to configure it from anywhere.

I would be asking as the next question, what is their backup MX configured like, i.e. if the phone line breaks and ADSL is down, is there a backup where mail is queued.

I would hope that has been considered & addressed as it was an external IT company that came in to do all this, but I'm not privy to all the details so I don't really know. I'm really just trying to do some research to see if there are reasonable grounds for myself and other remote users to 'opt out' of being channelled via the company server, if thats even possible. Some days I get no big attachments but other days I might get 40MB worth in one go. So by my calculations thats a 15 to 20 minute wait vs 1.5 to 2 minutes as it was before.

I guess fibre will solve the problem within the next few years but until then I foresee some frustrating times ahead.

If this is the result of recommendation by an external firm, then I would be getting worried at this point in time.

It may be they did not consider the needs of the remote out of office staff who would be constrained by the upload.

Yes, this is my concern. The worrying part is that I brought up the issue of upload speed with this external firm and they seemed quite dismissive as if it wasn't really a problem. I'll freely admit I know next to nothing about web & mail servers, but even I know upload speed & reliability is a very important factor when running your own servers.

Edited by deleted (Fri 14-Jun-13 19:53:35)

For the sort of usage you have specified I would personally recommend a minimum 10Mb upload (probably look at a 10Mb symmetric line). The problem is that if large attachments are being sent via the mail server or opened by remote users then it all happens over that crummy little upstream. And all the time the mailserver is sending your 40MB document to you the line will be virtually unusable for those people who work in the office as the upstream will be swamped.

Thanks to both yourself & Andrew for the advice. Has given some food for thought.

The only other thing I would add is that email probably isn't the best medium for 40MB attachments. Many companies block attachments much smaller than that (even as low as 5MB).

Some sort of dropbox of Secure FTP service would be preferable to using email for this volume of data.