G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Marcus Rohrmoser wrote: > >> ...and would be happy to receive emails with at max 1MB of weight if >> need be. 100K is fine, 1MB annoying and 10MB or above is >> indistinguishable from a DOS-attack. Can we amend the prose list >> rules/howto and just practice it that way?
[…] > Taking into account your parameters, and the specimens of attachment > seen earlier this month, after composing this mail I'll apply a > threshold of 768 kB (or KiB, whichever unit Mailman uses) to the > administrative interface. This seems fair. I can sympathize with Marcus, because it wasn’t that long ago since we replaced our semi-functional DSL with Starlink. My MacOS email client asks me what to do with any incoming email over 100K (downloads it if I’m not there to decide for it)… a holdover from my slow connection days, I guess. > Without applying data compression, and sometimes even if one does, > "practical documents" in the range of a few hundred pages--typical of > much long-form literature across many disciplines--seem irreducible very > far below your 1 MB annoyance threshold, so setting the limit exactly > there doesn't seem like it really buys anything special. One nice thing about splitting documents up into topics is that when the whole world is pounding on the slow Internet connection (e.g. April 2020), an 8K file still uploads and downloads without too much hassle. Doing an overnight “git clone” gives you a local copy that you can format locally, bypassing that huge PDF download. So if you have the right formatter, it’s easy to bypass issues like: > […] Also apparently it turns out that publishing economics, material > properties, and human ergonomics drive printed, bound matter > toward an accumulation point (or interval) around 300-400 pages. > The "plain text" of such a work falls easily below our 768 KB > limit, especially if gzipped or similar, whereas the same text set > as type blows well past 1 MB no matter what one does, it seems. The CATV industry, in the Year of Our Lord 2026, is still married tightly to PDFs and gets the Shivering Collywobbles at the idea of posting anything online, which is why I was able to maintain a huge firmware guide in groff for about 8 years. My having to deal with huge PDFs is one reason we moved to Starlink. (Of course, the local telco finally lit up the dark fiber that’s been running by the house for at least a decade in the last couple months.) — Larry
