email RFC's?

[Andrew Mathews]

Keith Morse wrote:
<snip>
> This comment is for the thread and not Mr. Bandel specifically.
> 
> 
> 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? 

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.

> 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.

> Calling them morons, Bubbas, or idiots doesn't solve the problem.

True. Most aren't bubbas or idiots, but innocence is no more unilateral 
than guilt.

> 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.

> I'm open for ideas.
> 

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".
-- 
Andrew Mathews
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