Attachments

[Peter Corlett]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:50:20PM +0100, Rob Jarratt via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> 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.

A typical digicam or scanner produces multi-megabyte files. Reducing them in
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.