On Jul 21, 2016 18:35, "Roberto Verzola" <rverz...@gn.apc.org> wrote: > > > Why not just upload the file somewhere that supports upload resume then > > just email the URL. Most FTP servers, and cloud storage, services like > > Dropbox or Google Drive, supports resuming of interrupted transfers. > > Maybe, but that is too much work, especially if the problem occurs regularly because you have a slow connection. Email with attachments is such a universal Internet event that I expect by this time that such 30-year (at least!) old technology as resumed file transfers would have found their way and become part (transparent and automatic) of the process. Or am I expecting too much?
Yeah you are. Regardless of what theyre used for today, some network protocols were designed for something else entirely and enhancements to those protocols tended to stick within the limitations of those designs. Email historically came from the mail systems from inside a multi-user machine, which worked under the assumption that mailbox files were written atomically and quickly with relatively short, text-based messages. Thus there was never a notion of a partially delivered message, nor one that could be resumed. Furthermore more reliable file transfer was always available throughout the history of mail protocols. In intra-host mail, the fact that you shared a filesystem meant that there was no point to duplicating the files. In host-to-host mail, other methods for serving and transferring files were always around. And many mailservers simply had attachment size limits and the like so large attachments never got a serious consideration. (it would be trivial to dos a server or user that arbitrarily accepted large files, like email does) So tldr: the reality is that email was never intended for heavy file transfers and that is unlikely to change any time in the near future. Mail has historically always relied on other file sharing methods.
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