At 09:53 AM 1/28/00 -0800, Mark Delany wrote or quoted:
>
>> To elaborate, users who retrieve large messages via pop3, or
>> transmit large messages via smtp often complain about being
>> disconnected, timing out, or a myriad of other equally vague
>> problems.
>
>Having worked in an ISP environment for many years I can only say
>that this problem is rampant in the industry.
The problem, as I see it, is that POP3 and SMTP are not designed for the
transmission of large binary messages. They are designed for the
transmission of short-to-medium-sized text messages. Unfortunately, users
in the current era of the "Web as shopping mall" frequently know of no
other way to send *anything*; they have been taught the Net is a
receive-only medium except for email. When they want to transmit something,
they try to do it through email because they don't realize they may have
other options.
My solution to this problem, for my users, has been to make sure they do
have other options, and to make sure they know it. I have worked hard to
impress on them that if they want to send a binary greater than a couple of
hundred Kbytes, they should FTP it to a location on the server (possibly
Web-accessible, possibly only FTP-accessible) and then email the URL to the
interested parties and let them download it at their leisure. I have also
pointed out to them that MIME encoding typically balloons a file by
anywhere from 50% to 85%, and therefore it will take them less time to FTP
the file instead of emailing it. (In other words, I give them an incentive
to avoid emailing large attachments -- their time is probably more valuable
to them than simply making me happy.)
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Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
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>From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
steam-powered /adj./
Old-fashioned or underpowered; archaic. This term does not have a
strong negative loading and may even be used semi-affectionately for
something that clanks and wheezes a lot but hangs in there doing
the job.
