> From: Jon Knight <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> sending an email with a large Word attachment to all 15000 users on
> campus isn't a good idea as our mail servers will melt. ... especially
> from non-academic departments who are used to doing paper based mass
> mailings to students. ... depite us offering to put the Word document
> on a web page and then send a small email pointing at it
This is an important distinction to make, between sending a large item to one
person who know's it's coming (which I view as an acceptable way to transfer
something from one person to another - but more on this below), and sending
it to an entire mailing list, most of whom won't be interested in the item.
Resources are far better used here by putting the item up for retrieval, so
that only those who are interested in it expend the resources to get a copy.
The caveat about using the email system to transfer things from one user to
another is that it is, after all, an *email* system, and engineered for that,
not a generic bulk-data-transfer system. To use a real-world analogy, the
post-office may take parcels, but above a certain size, you have to switch to
a shipping company, which is set up to deal with larger items. In a similar
vein, the email system was designed for certain characteristic payloads,
particularly size - i.e. *email*.
Noel
