on Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 01:18:24PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
Look: I don't care how you format attachments, whether uuencode or MIME, but a significant number of people on this list do not wish to receive attachments, or are prohibited from receiving them by their mail server admins. This is not a rule we have come to without any debate or for no reason and it's a fairly simple one: NO ATTACHMENTS. Put the file on the web somewhere and send the list the URL. They screw the digest version up and get error messages sent to the list admins. Please don't do it.
That paste screwed up the digest and gave error messages? Maybe you should consider changing your mailing software.. What happens if someone quite innocently begins a line "begin 600 something"? As for mail servers that don't allow xyz, if I insert a few words, let's see.. "fuck", "echelon", "company secrets". That probably got a few.
Yep, I've got the stompy boots on today. I didn't think anyone still used uuencode attachments :-(
It useful when you wish to send binary files quickly. I thought I was helping someone but obviously not. If you're going to apply this rule, you should also apply it to anyone posting configuration files. What about command outputs? That's potential bloat. As are all email signatures. How many people wouldn't want to see hotmail/yahoo/whatever auto-free-advertising-signatures off the list? I don't think those providers are banned..
If it was more than 15 lines, or wasn't 7bit clean, or caused something to crash, or it was attached to every mail I sent, or wasn't requested, I could maybe understand.
Putting it up on some webspace would actually use far more bandwidth than attaching it to the email per person. Instead of 15 lines of data, you would have to add on top of that dns traffic, http request headers and the request itself, http reply headers and then eventually the data you were trying to get. Are you going to provide the webspace and bandwidth for this?
For 15 lines, this seems like overkill. It is also a lot more effort for me. If I had to upload every file like that, I just wouldn't bother replying or reply privately and paste some base64 encoded file, which imho takes the value away from mailing lists.
For archiving purposes, http urls can quickly go out of date. If one person asked the question now, how do you know someone else, not on the list might ask the same question (via a search engine, etc) in 2 months, by which time the file would have been removed from the url? Will you provide a permanent archive for these various urls?
It wasn't advertising, yet the signatures many webmail systems add is blatant advertising. That seems to have no problem. It only takes 5 mails from one of those accounts to take up the room used by my "attachment".
This seems somewhat pedantic and draconian, but whatever.