title: Is there a maximum reasonable file size to attach to a MIME email with PHP?
body: <p>I run PHP on IIS6.  I have some PHP that successfully sends a 1KB image as an attachment on an email.  When I try and attach a 500KB PDF however (having changed the Content-Type), it hangs and after a few minutes I get "FastCGI process exceeded configured request timeout" (Error Number 258 (0x80070102)).</p>
  
  <p>Any thoughts on why it's taking so long to attach the PDF?  The solution is not to increase the timeout limit, I can't have users sitting there for 3+ minutes while the file gets sent.</p>
  
  <p>I've included my code below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    $headers   = "From: ".$from."\r\n";
      $headers .= "Reply-To: ".$from."\r\n";
      $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
      $headers .= "Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"".$uid."\"\r\n\r\n"; 
      $headers .="This is a multipart message in MIME format. \r\n\r\n";
  
      $headers .= "--".$uid."\r\n\r\n";
      $headers .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset-iso-8859-1\r\n";
      $headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable\r\n\r\n";
      $headers .= $text . "\r\n\r\n";
  
      $headers .= "--".$uid."\r\n\r\n";
      $headers .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset-iso-8859-1\r\n";
      $headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\r\n\r\n";
      $headers .= $html  . "\r\n\r\n";
  
      $headers .= "--".$uid."\r\n\r\n";
      $headers .= "Content-Type: image/png; name=\"".$filename."\"\r\n";
      $headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\r\n";
      $headers .= "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"".$filename."\"\r\n\r\n";
      $attachment = chunk_split(base64_encode(file_get_contents($path.$filename))); 
      $headers .= $attachment . "\r\n\r\n";
  
      $headers .= "--".$uid."\r\n\r\n";
  
      //send the email 
      $mail_sent = @mail( $to, $subject, $text, $headers );
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for any advice.</p>