Attachments

[Tony Aiuto]

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:
> [...]
> > 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.
>

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
> 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.