Message text written by Malcolm Purves >It sadens me therfore that the only course left to me is to unsubscribe.<
We shall be sorry to lose you. I entirely agree with you when such attachments are very large. Unfortunately with the ease and smoothness of e-mail it is easy and frankly often quite advantageous both to sender and recipient to 'attach' some relatively small file with a message. I too have to pay with 'real money' :-) for telephone time, connect time and a monthly charge. For a long time - until January this year - I only had a 14kb modem and yet my view was and still is that provided the attachment is not huge it is still preferable to have it with the message rather than take the (not inconsiderable) extra time to go to the web site, find the appropriate page, wait for the pictures to come up, search the site for the file, wait for the virus warnings etc and then extract the file. This time can easily be more than that involved in downloading the attachment. With a 14kbaud modem a 50kb binary file (like a .jpg) takes some 36 secs to download. It takes 16 secs with a 33kbaud modem operating (realistically) at 31.2kbaud. You are certainly pushing it to get the same file from a web site in such times - especially if you have to wait for adverts. Indeed I suspect that often one could retrieve nearly a 100kb attachment before equalling the web site overhead. The point is though that if senders always used a web site the recipient could choose whether to incur this overhead or not. Hmmm, it's an interesting question as to whether (for a mail list message of true general interest) a probable majority should each be coerced into spending longer (and spend more money) to retrieve the message from a web site just to allow a probable minority to be able to choose not to down load. On top of that not everyone has a web site that can be used in this way and some do not know how to do it even if they have one. So, even though it's 'real money' for me (and I am retired too) I'd go for files to be attached if they are really necessary to the message and are short and sweet. Before you do leave though, why not consider an IPS (Compuserve is one) where you get sight of the size of the file before you have to download it? That might solve all problems. Maybe others on this list know of other mail systems that have that property..? Patrick
