Re: Email messages: How large is too large?

[Ned Freed]

> As I recall, the reason that Mime was developed was precisely to allow
> email to substitute for many file transfers.  Before Mime, it was
> always a bit of an annoyance/embarassment that email could not be used
> in place of FTP for binary files.

Actually, the motivation for developing MIME was internationalization of email.
The ability to send content of types other than text was a secondary
consideration.

> But I guess we forgot to take the next big step, redesigning email to
> properly scale to handling arbitrarily large messages in a relatively
> graceful manner when necessary.

I remain to be convinced that problems handling large messages have
much if anything to do with the modern ESMTP protocol. It seems to me
that it has a lot more to do with implementation and deployment.

                                Ned