Brian - is this observation too detailed to include in the Transparency draft?
I'm thinking that at least some part of the loss-of-transparency issues might get more attention from the nice people who want to put application gateways between themselves and the rest of the world if you point out that this has led to unintended results like 28-Megabyte attachments, because it's MUCH easier to misuse e-mail for file transfer than it is to use message/external bodies that invoke FTP for file transfer for an arbitrary user inside a corporate firewall.
I'm trying to KEEP this from sounding like "negotiating with terrorists", but it's not working, is it?
Spencer
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, December 13, 1999 9:57 PM
To: Vernon Schryver
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Email messages: How large is too large?
On Mon, 13 Dec 1999 17:44:39 MST, Vernon Schryver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> Didn't I see mention of something called an "external body"? That notion
> avoids the scaling problems of requiring that all spool directories and
> all destination mail directories be large enough when many people decide
> to forward a 28 MByte Good Times virus.
message/external-body dates all the way back to 1992, in RFC 1341 (the MIME
Dark Ages). At the time, it seemed like a very good way to address the problem
in classic computer science style - instead of passing the data structure,
pass a pointer to it.
Unfortunately, for most of the Internet users of today, the availability
of long-term stable externally-reachable storage is low enough that you
usually end up dereferencing a null pointer.....
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech
