In this glorious age of viruses, trojans, prolific email and spam, we've been looking at options to improve attachment handling at work. Xythos Intellittach came up.
It also occurred to me that using vac might be a nice way to do attachment stubbing. Strip the attachment at the mail gateway, vac it up, use the fingerprint in the URL and send it on. Then retrieve it using a script to listen on port 80 and return the file associated with the fingerprint. The nicest part about using venti as a backend is that any spam, viruses, etc. that get through the gateway only exist once in the system, as does that 100MB PowerPoint that the PHB sends out once a month. There are a few commercial systems that do something similar (ZipLip, etc.) for Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance. A related idea occurred to me before: http://lists.cse.psu.edu/archives/9fans/2002-July/019109.html but it seems the general idea of ticket-based ACLs in WebDAV is picking up steam, so the attachment stubbing scenario might be less foreign these days. Having the entire mail store in venti is probably the best way to handle it, I keep thinking of organizations (like mine) who would never make that move, but would consider some blended solution to better manage the runaway mail storage space and the landmine of SMTP gateways preventing the boss' random attachments from reaching point B. -Jack
