Through email, do you mean, from a local email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird, or do you mean from a web-based email service such as Yahoo or Gmail?

Local email clients use a totally different protocol to send the mail than uploading a file to a web site uses. Whereas, if you used a web-based email service, then when you send a file through email, you'd have to upload it to the web-based-mail service first, and it *would* be exactly like uploading a photo to the BBS, and I would expect it to behave the same way.

It would be an interesting test to try something like that: find some kind of a site that also accepts file uploads through a web form like this BBS does, and see if you run into the same problem. Then we could be sure the problem was with all web form uploads.