Ionut Alex Chitu, who first noticed the upgrade, also pointed out one problem that it creates.  “[F]ew mail providers will accept . . . such a big message,” he writes, but “it’s safe to send messages bigger than 10 MB to other Gmail accounts, to Yahoo Mail Plus or to other premium accounts.”  Otherwise, you (or the intended recipient of your email) might be out of luck.

And of course, allowing larger attachments doesn’t begin to address some other Gmail-related issues.  “It would be nice if Gmail showed a progress bar for the upload and if uploading files to Gmail was faster and more reliable,” notes Chitu.  “But maybe we’re asking too much.”

It appears that the attachment upgrade will have to suffice for now, anyway; if, by some chance, you want to send an even larger file, Adam Ostrow lists several alternatives.  Yet a number of people have pointed out that they don’t even want to receive something as large as a 20 MB attachment, so Google seems to have satisfied the general public’s needs in that respect.