Email issues, attachment size limit -how much is too much?

[WebTechie]

Recently my client complaint about emails with attachment (upto 10 MB) were not going out from Outlook Express due to to server issues and was receiving following error -

Message received while sending an email with attachment (little big = 5 MB):

Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Subject \'Test Mail\', Account: \'WEB\', Server: \'domainxxx.com\', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: \'421 uswest7.myserverhosts.com Service not available - SIGTERM or SIGINT received - closing connection.\', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 421, Error Number: 0x800CCC0F

Same issue is there with downloading email with attachments (not more than 10 MB).

And when I raised a support ticket I was instructed to reconfigure the account, without doing any troubleshooting.

I tried with different PC, different ISP and different Email Clients (Outlook Express 6.0, Thunderbird 3.0). Same condition was there. I complained again.

Support staff checked with mail2web, mail was working with that site.

But I was receiving the error with Email Clients (Outlook Express 6.0, Thunderbird 3.0) and not with Webmail. On complaining about the same I received following response:

This is caused by the attachment being too large during the time it's sent.

If you plan on emailing a large attachment, we suggest sending by uploading the attachment to your public_html (directory or a subfolder of it) and providing a link to the attachment.

We have upload limits set for security purposes and to ensure the reliability of all email clients as a whole. Larger limits can easily cause entire hard disks to fill up unexpectedly and cause server crashes, of which would definitely not be a good thing.
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Now I want to ask few questions, and expect H9 to provide answers to these:

1. What is the limit of attachment?
2. Is a 5 MB attachment too high for H9 servers?
3. Why attachment from web mail is working file with 5-6 MB attachment, which is not the case with Email Clients?
4. Why a upto 20 MB file has to be uploaded to FTP for sending with email?
5. Do I train all my cleints for sending attachments through FTP?
6. Or shall I change to some other Host.

Waiting for response from H9 staff, H9 Resellers and H9 End Users.

[H9NickH]

This a user-to-user forum and is not actively monitored by our support staff. As this is an account specific issue and you "expect" a response from us, you need to open a ticket regarding these issues.