A couple of members have asked whether or not it's OK to post
photographs or other digital images to the list. Unfortunately, it's not
currently feasible to do this. In essence, handling large attachments,
such as digital photos, scanned images - or even massive HTML, Word
or Adobe files - are just not what email lists were designed to do.
Fundamentally, large attachments pose two problems for the listserver
and for the list members:
First, the shear volume. Listservers work by taking a single email
message and resending it to all members of the list. If you have 150
members (approximately our current membership), one 2K email
message becomes 150K of email messages. Easily manageable by
the list server hardware and software. Add a 100K digital image and
that becomes 15 Megs of email messages! Consider that this single
server may be handling 100's of other email lists and that there may be
multiple postings of large email attachments for each list, and you're all
of a sudden dealing with gigabytes of email!
Second, the typical list member has limited resources and has no
choice regarding whether or not he or she receives the attachment. The
average home internet user logs in once every day or so, using a 56K
connection (or slower!) expecting to grab his or her email and log off, all
within a few minutes. If that day's (or week's, or month's...) email
includes a dozen or two digital pic's, that quick check for email turns
into "Hmmn, maybe I should walk the dog" or even "I wonder if this
would be a good day to paint the shed". Ditto for disk quotas: Doesn't
take long to fill that 1 Meg or even 5 Meg space that your ISP has set
aside, when you're receiving lots of 250K email messages, and when
that quota is filled, you don't get any more email! (Actually, this is
already happening; I typically get 10-20 "Email Rejected. User Mailbox
Full" messages each week.)
To avoid these problems (and to keep my ISP happy), the WAFlyfishers
list is currently set to reject any messages over 40K in size. Since the
average 640x480 JPG format photo is about 50-60K, it won't make it.
Of course, you can use image processing to reduce the size of the
photo (or the resolution) to fit within the 40K limit, but we still face the
issue of inundating the members with long downloads, so this should be
used with discretion (and in accord with any feedback we get from the
list members).
So that's the long and the short of if. Email lists are great at what they
are intended to do: Provide a quick and easy (and informal) way of
exchanging information among a select group of people. But they're no
substitute for web sites or other, newer internet technologies.
My hope is to someday have a full-fledged web site to serve as an
adjunct to the email list. A place where, in addition to accessing the
message archives, members can post articles, pictures and other
information that may be of interest to other list members, as well as
providing resources similar to many of the other fly fishing related sites.
Unfortunately - in addition to being totally web ignorant - I've got other
competing priorities, not the least of which is fishing, so it may be a
while. If, in the meantime, anyone else is interested in setting up a
WAFlyfishers web site (or even a page within their existing web site),
feel free to do so. I'm sure we'd all enjoy having a place to share our
fishing photos and other info that doesn't work within the email list
constraints.
I know that, I for one, would sure like to see one of those 18"
blackmouth Leland claims to be catching!!
-Wes
Wes Neuenschwander
Seattle, WA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
