Why is there no response when attaching a file to an email in the WebMail Channel?

When attempting to add a large attachment to a composed message, the system does not respond and Users may receive an error stating "This channel failed to accept needed data." The request being sent from the client must be fully processed by Apache before it can be handed off to Tomcat, and the request body containing a large file takes a long time to be received and processed. The primary reason for receiving no response at all is that Apache is timing out the request (see the 'TimeOut' directive information below). The following are options to provide your users with feedback in this situation: 1) Utilize the Apache 'LimitRequestBody' configuration directive to set an upper bound on all incoming request bodies. Apache will check the content-length header and return an error message if this size is exceeded, prior to handling the request as it normally does. 2) Increase the Apache 'TimeOut' directive. This would allow the request to be processed eventually, but not until the entire file has been uploaded. For a standard broadband connection, a 70MB file would take 18 min 40 sec. During this time the user will not receive any response from the server, as the request is still incoming. Thus, bumping up the TimeOut directive to accommodate such large uploads is not feasible. If this option is used in conjunction with utilizing the "LimitRequestBody", users may wait the time to upload the file and then receive a message that states that the file is too large to upload. 3) A complex feedback mechanism utilizing Server Push methods could be implemented. However, there would be little to no information available to give the client other than a 'busy' screen. It would not be able to tell them if their file upload was too large prior to receiving the full request. Unicon recommends that institutions utilize the Apache 'LimitRequestBody' configuration directive option. However, the appropriate option for each institution may vary.