> 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
A lot of people say this and I don't see a particular reason why it
should be the case. Both POP and SMTP do little more than read a file
and write it to a socket. ftp does little more than read a file and
write it to a socket. In the case of binary, the file will be encoded,
big deal.
Perhaps the problem is that email clients tend not to deal well with
large files - that's a bug. The reality is that people find email an easy method
to send things and I'm sure they will continue to do so. And, as people who
provide email services perhaps we should be making sure it does what people
want rather than bemoaning the fact that it lets technical novices exchange
all sorts of unlikely data with each other.
Mark.
