Email sizes

The question has been raised internally that perhaps we need to reassess what we've set for email message-size limits. When we set our current limit, we did it to the apparent defacto standard for mail size limits, which is about 10 meg.

This, perhaps, is not what it should be for an institution of higher-ed where research is performed. We have certain researchers on campus that routinely play with datasets larger than 10MB, sometimes significantly larger. And these researchers would like to electronically distribute these datasets to other researchers, and the easiest means of doing that by far is email. The primary reason we have mail-servers serving the (for example) chem.wwu.edu domain is to have these folk with much larger message size limits. Otherwise, these folk would have their primary email in Exchange.

The routine answer I've heard for handling really large file sizes is to use, "alternate means," to send the file. We don't have a FTP server for staff use, since we have a policy that forbids the use of unauthenticated protocols for transmitting passwords and things. We could do something like Novell does with ftp.novell.com/incoming and create a drop-box that anyone with a WWU account can read, but that's sort of a blunt-force solution and by definition half of a half-duplex method. Our researchers would like a full duplex method, and email represents that.

So what are you all using for email size limits? Do you have any 'out of band' methods (other than snail mail) for handling larger data sizes?