Re: Email messages: How large is too large?

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Wed, 15 Dec 1999 10:17:26 +1000, George Michaelson said:
> Actually, I think the best example I know of the 'right way' is the
> old 'new RFC' email Joyce Reynolds used to post, which had the two variant
> MIME attachments for fetch it via FTP and fetch via the web. We just need
> more people to be that sensible!

We don't need more people to be that sensible.

We need MUAs that make it easy to be that sensible, and we need ubiquitous
storage for the external-body parts.

I've received large e-mail attachments from people on Macs who don't
have a web server handy.  I'l even admit to attaching large documents,
even though my MUA makes it relatively easy to do so(*), and I even
have a webserver running on this machine.

Why did I do it?  Because I *know* I'll forget to go remove the file from
the webserver directories after the recipient has retrieved it, and I've
been too lazy to set up an automated "kill after 2 weeks" command...

/Valdis

(*) And of course, I decided to double-check this before hitting 'send',
and discovered that it (a) does allow building anon-FTP references but
doesn't do http: references and (b) there's a bug because somebody forgot
to overhaul some code.. ;)

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