Keith Morse wrote: <snip>
This comment is for the thread and not Mr. Bandel specifically.ftp. It's been around since Hector was a pup, has low overhead, and is a standard. It works both ways, both upload and download. Anonymous ftp servers are so common you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one.
This thread strikes me as being elitist and a common attitude I see with IT, IS, (or HMFIC's) people that manage mail services. Fine, email is not apropos for sending files, but what do we provide the customer as an alternative?
My client base is not residential but government, quasi-goverment, and non-profits that generate and diseminate MS-Word docs, pdfs, jpgs, spreadsheats, and other types of non-ASCII information.So is mine. Supreme Court, State of New Mexico. We use Word Perfect and Adobe Acrobat as the standard, supported products.
True. Most aren't bubbas or idiots, but innocence is no more unilateral than guilt.Calling them morons, Bubbas, or idiots doesn't solve the problem.
My limit is 50mb per email. I've noticed that people that use attachments are fairly active email users and as such don't present much issue with respect to mail spool size. Also my customer base is probably not as large as David's so my bandwidth and disk storage requirements are not as steep.I have 1707 users (as of this afternoon) of whom 50% are on 56k leased lines that piggyback to a regional T-1, then back to our DS3. A couple of weeks ago one individual decided that *everybody* needed to see some pictures. The attachment size was 25Mb! Now imagine 850 people trying to download this message over 56k connections, some with as many as 75 people at each facility. Needless to say, the calls started flooding in about their inability to establish connectivity to their database servers (which are their lifeblood as well as the general public's) people waiting in line, judges having to delay proceedings because they couldn't access their case schedules, and on and on. 90% of these people didn't even know the person sending the message. Needless to say, the limit was reduced to avoid a repeat of a problem of this type. I don't care *who* it is, nobody should be able to impact a production environment that the public relies on in such a manner.
When somebody needs to download files off the internet, do they email you the files? Of course not! They email a link to the files, not the file itself. Good Lord! Next thing we'll be having iso images sent as email attachments! An email server is not an ftp server anymore than plutonium is a dietary supplement.
Remember that email attachments are handled by uuencode/uudecode to pass properly. A typical 1Mb email attachment has become 2Mb after uuencode processes it. Multiply this by X amount of messages, calculate the total number of messages and suddenly network usage has doubled. Many people still pay for bandwidth based upon usage, so now this simple act of attaching a file, rather than a link to the file is costing someone real money. Unless the sender is paying part of their bill, I doubt if any of these people suddenly become best buddies with them. All of which is completely unnecessary, and only because Joe Lunchbucket (thanks Kurt) doesn't want to be "inconvenienced".I'm open for ideas.
--
Andrew Mathews
---------------------------------------------------------------------
7:05pm up 33 days, 18:01, 12 users, load average: 1.10, 1.16, 1.11
---------------------------------------------------------------------
We read to say that we have read.
_______________________________________________
Linux-users mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
