SMTP size limits on WordPress.com servers when using Post by Email
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I mostly post to my wordpress.com blog via the email interface (because it’s the most convenient for my work flow), and my posts are image-heavy.
This means that I often run into the size limit of WordPress’ SMTP servers (which is 100MB now, I think, on mx1.dfw.wordpress.com), and then I have to either rescale my images, split the post up, or host the images off-site.
Neither of these solutions are very satisfactory.
Would it be possible for WordPress to just increase that SMTP size limit? To, like, 500MB, which should be enough for everybody. :-)
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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(And just think of how much extra storage you’ll be able to sell when people can post more and larger images.) :-0
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Hi there,
The problem is not with the memory limits, but with the fact that you’re using images that have not been optimised for the web in any way.
Your media library is full of images over 2000 pixels in width which comes in at file sizes ranging from 2MB to 8MB. Using images of that size is extremely inefficient, as your site and the vast majority of computer monitors can’t display them at full size while they make your site take longer to load. We also carry a much higher cost for bandwidth use due to that, more than we’d make out of the extra storage we might sell.
Your theme can display images at a maximum of 825 pixels wide. Let’s say you resize your images to 1200 pixels wide, which is pretty much the max most computer screens can display at full size, we’re speaking of image sizes of less than 500kb, meaning you could easily include 200 images in a single post by email before you’ll hit our memory limits. By using an image optimizer like JPEGMini or even the built in optimisation tools of Photoshop you can save even more space, and your site will load faster, which will make it rank higher in search engines at the same time.
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I post the images with a pretty high resolution on purpose. For instance, when doing comic book reviews, it’s really handy that people can just click on an image of a comic book page and actually read it: When scaled down to the sizes you’re suggesting, they often become illegible.
And I don’t quite understand your point about the blog itself not loading fast — the displayed images are rescaled down to 660 pixels by default server-side.
Which also mean I don’t get your point about bandwidth usage: The full-sized images are only displayed by the people who actually click on the images, and that’s not a huge number of people. But the people who are that interested in a particular image shouldn’t have to look at something that’s barely larger than the default image size.
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If you have a reason for not optimising your images or simply don’t want to we can’t force you. But that is the reason you’re hitting our SMTP memory limits. We cannot adjust those limits at this time.
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OK, I guess I’ll just have to rewrite the MUA bit that sends these post to automatically split themselves up into 100MB parts and then send the “actual” blog HTML separately, referring to the already-sent images.
It’s a pain, but I guess it’s just a SMOP.
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