Symantec Mail Security for Microsoft Exchange (SMSMSE) reports a file attachment as unscannable and you get an error: "Scan Engine Error:  The maximum file size within a container was exceeded."

Scan Engine Error:  The maximum file size within a container was exceeded.

By definition, a container format could wrap any kind of data. A Container can be an Archive format (ex.: ZIP, RAR, 7z, etc ) but also Multi-purpose office document file formats (ex.: DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, etc). The size of the container itself does not reflect the size of the file/s in it once they are unwrapped.

To adjust the file scanning limits in Symantec Mail Security for Exchange to allow those container you will need to do the following:

To get an idea for the the values you need in the steps described below, you can expand some of these files yourself either by opening them as an archive in a tool such as 7-zip or by changing the extension to .zip and then extracting the files like you would a typical zip file. You can then look at the total size of the expanded file and the size of individual components.

 In the console on the primary navigation bar, click Policies.

1. In the sidebar under General, click Scanning Limits.

2. In the "Maximum size of one extracted file (in MB)" box, type the maximum file size, in megabytes, for individual files in a container file. You can enter a value from 1 to 1024. The default value is 100.

3. In the "Maximum total size of all extracted files (in MB)" box, type the maximum size, in megabytes, of all extracted files. You can enter a value from 1 to 1024. The default value is 200.

4. On the toolbar, click Deploy changes to apply your changes.