On Fri, 28 Apr 2000, Andy Bradford wrote:
> I may be rehashing old topics, and I may sound a little bit old
> fashioned (even at age 26), but I don't believe email was ever meant to
> handle that large amount of traffic. Or, in other words SMTP != FTP
> I am still of the opinion that one should instruct users to use the
> right protocols for the right reasons. Hence, put the 10MB PowderPoint
> file in a public or private ftp directory and then include a URL to
> fetch it in the email.
I agree with this sentiment, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to
find good ways to enforce it. Case in point: we do web development for an
organization that has a PR firm develop brochures and then send them to us
for posting on their website. The files are often 7-10 MB in size, large
enough to be cumbersome for e-mail, small enough to make overnighting a
ZIP disk seem a little excessive.
The organization hosts their site with us, and so we could obviously
instruct them to upload the files through FTP, but the PR firm shouldn't
necessarily be able to do this. It gets more complicated when you think
that it's not always going to be the same person at the PR firm sending
the files, and that there are many cases where other third parties need to
send us materials related to the site.
Clearly it's a complicated issue, but it seems that as broadband access to
the net becomes more common, businesses are going to expect to be able to
use one "interface" to do all their communications, be it plain text
messages or large multi-megabyte file transfers. I cringe every time
someone sends me a 7 MB mail message, but it's difficult to explain to
them why this is a bad idea.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone's found a good general solution to
this in a production/business environment.
Chris
-- Chris Hardie -----------------------------
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