Forty-Five Recipients, Ten-Megabyte Limits
Anna coordinates a nine-person project team. She must send a 22 MB PDF progress report to 45 external stakeholders; several of them sit behind corporate mail systems that reject attachments over 10 MB. Anna's own mail provider allows 25 MB per message. One stakeholder, Mr Kaur, is a journalist who must not learn any other recipient's address. Separately, Anna needs to circulate an internal note about a staffing matter to the team only. The team's distribution list includes a colleague on parental leave who has asked to be contacted only in emergencies, and the list is managed centrally by IT.
1. How should Anna distribute the 22 MB report, and why will the obvious approach fail?
Read the worked answer
Do not attach it. Publish it and send a link.
The obvious approach fails for two independent reasons:
- Her own limit. Attachments are encoded for transport and grow by roughly a third. A 22 MB PDF becomes about 29 MB in the message, which exceeds her provider's 25 MB ceiling. The message would be rejected before it ever reached a stakeholder.
- Their limits. Even if she split the file or compressed it to 9 MB, the recipients with 10 MB limits would be at the edge, and corporate filters often strip attachments of unexpected types regardless of size.
- Confidentiality. Forty-five copies of a 22 MB file also means forty-five recipients who can forward it freely.
A workable approach: place the PDF in the organisation's own shared storage, set the link to view-only with an expiry date, and send a short plain-text email containing the link, the deadline for comments and a contact name. Anna should test the link from a signed-out browser and send to one stakeholder first to confirm it works before sending to all 45.
2. How should Anna send the report to Mr Kaur so that he sees no other addresses, and what is the weakness of the usual answer?
Read the worked answer
The usual answer is to put Mr Kaur in Bcc on the main mailing. It would deliver the report, but it is the wrong instrument here:
- Bcc protects addresses only as long as nobody in the To or Cc fields is visible to him. If Anna leaves To empty and puts Mr Kaur alone in Bcc, a reply-all from him reaches only Anna - but the message also looks like bulk mail and is more likely to be filtered as spam.
- It gives Anna no control over tone: a journalist receiving what looks like a mass mailout to 44 hidden others may reasonably conclude he is one of a list, which is exactly the impression to avoid for a press contact.
The sound approach is a separate, personalised message to Mr Kaur alone, with the same link, addressed to him by name and offering a briefing. That guarantees no address is exposed regardless of what any recipient does with reply-all, and it costs Anna one extra minute.
3. Anna drafts the internal staffing note and is about to send it to the team distribution list. What should she change and why?
Read the worked answer
She should stop and send it to named individuals instead.
- The list contains someone who has asked not to be contacted. Using the list would override a reasonable and recorded request for a non-emergency message. That is a courtesy failure and potentially a data-protection concern, since the request is on record.
- The list is managed by IT. Anna cannot edit it herself, so the practical route is to address the note to the eight relevant people, or ask IT to create a sub-list. Removing one person from a centrally managed list to solve a one-off problem is the wrong fix.
- Sensitive content does not belong in the same thread as an external report. Forwarding chains and reply-all habits are how confidential notes reach the wrong audience. The note needs a fresh message, a clear subject that does not look like the report, and a check of the recipient list immediately before sending.
- Avoid forwarding chains for the content itself. Summarise rather than forwarding earlier messages that contain unnecessary detail.