*>
*> It's actually worse than that. Instead of demanding a way to move large
*> files, they demand a way to move large email messages, and they cannot
*> understand the distinction.
*>
Vernon,
As I recall, the reason that Mime was developed was precisely to allow
email to substitute for many file transfers. Before Mime, it was
always a bit of an annoyance/embarassment that email could not be used
in place of FTP for binary files.
But I guess we forgot to take the next big step, redesigning email to
properly scale to handling arbitrarily large messages in a relatively
graceful manner when necessary.
Bob Braden
*>
*> ] If the user would like to transfer 28 MB we should make it possible
*> ] (there is always somebody who is in front of the big group, so I do not
*> ] say that just because one person wants it we have to make it possible).
*>
*> There are scaling problems. Consider how many disk drives an ISP would
*> need to dedicate to mail directories to support many users moving 28 MByte
*> messages. A 32 GByte drive can hold only about 1000 such messages.
*> Consider an ISP with 1,000,000 customers. Remember the bad old days
*> before the ESMTP extension when a second SMTP hop would run out of space
*> in its spool directory, and the message would try to bounce.
*>
