Ask HN: Why there is an attachment limit of 25mb on gmail?

SMTP is pretty inefficient, especially with binary files, so a 25MB file could be quite a bit bigger during transmission. Add to that being able to send to many email addresses and GMail could end up sending out e.g. 1GB for a single mail, even though the stored value is 25MB.

Frankly, I'd be a bit irritated if people started sending me 100MB files via email. Put it up on a server and let people download it.

Gmail is free. Storage costs money to maintain. 25mb limit per email + 7.5gig free 'storage' ain't bad.

Probably so that people continue using it as email and not as a file transferring service ?