Hello,

Can you have a look at this question and check the articles mentioned there? Also (and especially) take note of the network related settings.

In order to fix my own problem, I converted the 3.6 MB Tif file to a jpg file which reduced the size of the file to 903 KB and it was then sent without a problem. It appears there is a size limit that is set below the 3.6 MB some where but I don't know for sure if it is with the outgoing server or the receiving server because I have an ad on that verifies the recipients address before sending the email. From the various things I have read, it appears that something, somewhere is set to a very low size of less than 3.6 MB.

Could it be your anti virus? it is a timeout error message, not a size error.

My guess is your anti virus is fiddling around for so long the server just gives up and says forget it.

Hello again,

When searching for Godaddy / secureserver.net and timeouts, there seems to be a history for SMTP timeouts many people have suffered. Not to say the issue is entirely with Godaddy though. There was even a bug filed for this issue that still hasn’t been fixed, assumingly because the issue is very rare and not really or clearly caused by SeaMonkey or Thunderbird.

This thread dicusses possible options like disabling Norton Internet Security features (that may apply to other security software as well). Amongst them are disabling attachments scanning or enabling Silent Mode. This page describes the issue may also occur for Apple Mail users.

This page at Godaddy's lists the settings to use, contains a link to their Email account limitations (30MB, with a note that says receiving email servers may have set this to 5MB), and also has a page for Thunderbird [1]. Now this page claims setting the outgoing mail port to 25 may help for Thunderbird users, but I wouldn't rely on it to be the soultion.

What I would do:

• Try to find out if the issue occurs for different recipients (users at different ISPs) to find out if the receiving server may be of any influence. I'm not sure whether the timeout error should occur if this is the case (I'd expect some bounce message instead, but sometimes error messages may be misleading).
• (Again) make sure the networking is as it should. The question I referred to above reminded me of such issue I suffered myself years ago when switching to broadband and not adapting the dialin optimized MTU setting, hence causing slow traffic for the system. You could visit a website like Dslreports to help out with this.
• Focus on the speed when uploading attachments in your email. This should be "normal", i.e. theoretically your max upload speed should be reached, or at least it should not be clearly slower than e.g. when uploading a file to your ISP (or better: Godaddy if you have some space there), though email servers may be able to receive emails a bit slower.
• Temporarily disable any virus scanning or other network related software and see if that affects the upload speed.
• Try several settings (ports and security settings) as mentioned on [1] above.

(The order above is somewhat random.)

Note that when it turns out the (or a) receiving email server(s) may have set their limit to about 5 MB, a file of e.g 3.5 MB may reach that size since there's always some overhead (+30%) caused by the way email attachments are encoded.

You may have some good points there. I have had some other issues with GoDaddy, like they inconsistently put random stuff into a filter folder that I had set up to keep certain items out of the inbox. I also have an ongoing problem with them where I was receiving the Publishers Clearing House stuff to my in box. Everything from Publishers Clearing House and PCH suddenly stopped. I contacted PCH to find out why I was no longer getting mail from them and I was told that their systems is still sending me mail on a daily basis to the same GoDaddy address. They also said that the mail was not being returned. When I contacted GoDaddy I was told that there was no problem on their end and that they had no idea why I am no longer receiving the PCH emails. Your response confirms my belief that GoDaddy has some serious issues which I see as something similar to Involuntarily Tampering with the US mail. Maybe I need to call GoDaddy again and ask them what they did with my Multi-Million Dollar PCH Prize Notification. With my Luck I would not be surprised if I am the next Million Dollar Loser who failed to respond. In any event thanks for the info. I will check into all of that as soon as I get a chance.

I had a similar problem yesterday, though I cannot now remember what the message I saw in Tbird actually said, but it was a timeout. The attachment I was attempting to send to my brother was even larger, a PDF of over 6 MB. He and I use the same ISP and I'd checked beforehand if there was any limit on the size of messages for Inboxes and it was 20 MB so well within. It seemed to be going out OK but the progress bar held at 100% and stayed there without disappearing, then there was something about a timeout. I therefore assumed the send had failed and wrote to my brother to say so - his reply was that it had come through fine!