Couldn’t Send/Receive Emails with Attachments Greater than ~3MB

So awhile back, I hit some weird problem with my email. I was trying to schedule weekly backups of my websites and email them to me. My HD-Trailers.net backups worked fine, but my Krunk4Ever.com backups were giving me problems. The email would come through and the size would be correct (~5MB), but the email didn’t have any attachments. I tried copying it over to another directory, and the size shrinks down to a few KB.

Thinking it might that my Krunk4Ever.com mail server has some attachment size restriction, I tried sending it to my GMail account and the same thing occurs. Do note, I have GMail mapped in Outlook 2003 as a IMAP folder. I see a 5MB email, but no attachment listed. For the time being, I concluded that someone’s restricting the attachment size and I would just go and backup manually once a week.

However, another problem occurred when I was trying to share a video with someone. It was a 3.12MB video and Outlook would just not send it. It kept on giving me the following error:

Task ‘Krunk4Ever – Sending’ reported error (0x800CCC13) : ‘Unable to connect to the network. Check your network connection or modem.’

Searching for that code resulted in some winsock error, but that didn’t get me anywhere. I decided to shoot DreamHost an email and their reply was:

Our email supports up to 40 megabytes for outgoing and incoming emails. Our webmail; however, is limited to smaller file-sizes If you need to send-receive large attachments you would need to install your own custom webmail and possibly PHP or use a full-featured email client such as outlook or thunderbird. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

It turns out not all large attachments were blocked. A few 5MB files have gotten through before, and if I just keep trying, eventually they make it through. I went to GMail (web based) and searched for previous emails where I had sent my backup databases and they were indeed okay and I could see the attachment fine. That led me to a preliminary belief that Outlook or IMAP had some sort of attachment size restriction. Testing it out in Thunderbird was something I had planned to try next, but didn’t really get around to it.

Today, I was trying to email my work email some logs that some Vista people wanted and I hit the same darn problem. I eventually uploaded it via OWA (Outlook Web Access), but then that got me angry. So I began searching around for other people who have gotten the 0x800CCC13 error, but a quick skim didn’t result in anything useful. There were a lot of mentions of firewall and antivirus, but think that my regular email came through fine, I didn’t see how a firewall or antivirus would be acting up…

Then I tried disabling my antivirus and resent the large email. Guess what, it WORKED! !@%$!$#%#!@%@%#!@% The antivirus software I use on my main box is CA (Computer Associates) eTrust, which is what we use at work. Given that Microsoft is a software company and they mandate us to use eTrust, I just assumed it was good enough. eTrust is actually rather nice. It’s small, lightweight, and pretty nice on the system resources.

So I went into eTrust to see if I could configure this weird email problem I was getting. I could not find a single email option to configure. It does mention it scans incoming and outgoing emails, but there was nothing to configure that was email based. The only possible solution I saw was to add Outlook to the exclude list which I didn’t want to do.

I eventually decided to uninstall eTrust and went with AVG which I’ve installed on most of my other machines, and my emails with large attachments appear to be working fine.