When Software Should Stop Bad User Behaviour

In grinding through the 1614 email messages I had when I opened Outlook this morning, one email in particular stood out to me: it was an email with an attachment that was 31 megabytes in size. THIRTY-ONE FREAKING MEGABYTES. That’s beyond ludicrous, that’s well into the “will crash some email clients even if it happens to make it through and doesn’t kill your entire Inbox and cause all your other email to bounce” category. Now, the person sending it likely didn’t realize it was so big (I sure hope they didn’t), but here’s where smart software should come into play: an email client simply shouldn’t allow a user to send an email attachment that big without a polite warning, stating something such as “The attachment you’re trying to send is very large – it may not be received properly”. The threshold would be set fairly high – likely around 10 MB before it would trigger the warning – and there should be an option for users to ignore the warning if it’s something they do often and know that the person on the other end can accept large files. No one wants a return to irritating Clippy-like helpers, but there’s just no way that intelligent software should let users do something as foolish as send a 31 MB email attachment.