I'm surprised by the amount of disagreement with the author. This will probably be voted down, but here are a few reasons I dislike large attachments:

1) I don't trust online email services to store/backup my email and like to back up my own email. These giant attachments make up 99.9% of the storage space and don't compress well. My email backup has increased 20-fold in size since gmail upped their attachment limit.

2) Desktop email clients often start to chug slower when the inbox gets large. Before I've had over 100,000 emails in my Outlook Express inbox since 2003. Sorting by subject, searching, etc. were instantaneous. With these attachments, I have to periodically sort by size and run my attachment cleaner script to scrub them out or Outlook Express will get slower.

Maybe I'm using antiquated technologies but if others want better control of their own email, they might agree too.