18 Jun
2020
18 Jun
'20
6:56 p.m.
On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 5:01 AM Peter Corlett via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:50:20PM +0100, Rob Jarratt
via cctalk wrote:
[...]
This is a tradeoff.
- Allowing, let's say, 50MB attachments would enhance the experience for
some people. I suspect there are many of them on this list.
- Allowing any attachments at all would annoy some people. They tend to
post a lot about how annoyed they would be. I suspect there are fewer of
them than the others.
- Allowing tiny attachments doesn't please anyone.
A typical digicam or scanner produces multi-megabyte files. Reducing them in
Easy, pictures of unidentified components,
sending out schematics that
have
been reverse engineered, documentation, pictures
of scope traces when
trying
to find a fault, all sorts. I would agree on a
size limit though.
The kind of size limit required to keep attachments small enough to not
annoy
people who are not interested in them would be too low for this purpose.
The
annoyance increases further when people with broken email clients (or who
just
never bothered to learn their tools) include senders' attachments in their
replies.
size to fit within e.g. a 1MB limit would still cause
the same level of
inconvenience to the sender as uploading it somewhere and posting a link as
well as reducing the quality and utility to those who are interested.
I also note an inverse relationship between the size of an email and the
quality of its contents
Further, an orders-of-magnitude explosion in the
resources used by this
list
would reduce the number of people willing to host it. My shell server
which I
use for mail is perhaps typical: it has a 20TB/month transfer cap which is
effectively infinite, but its 20GB disk would be eventually consumed by
all of
those attachments kept forever in the list archives that people also want.
A *person* willing to host it is the wrong approach. That makes the truck
number 1.
For redundancy you need to pay a service to host it, and have a few people
with administrative rights.
If people are scared of the service turning down and losing all history,
they can personally archive every message.