On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 09:33:37AM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
On 27-Jul-06 Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 08:46 +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
Far easier solution: don't accept e-mail with attachments
Wouldn't work for me, there are too many legitimate reasons why somebody would need to send me an e-mail with an attachment.
I have to agree with this too! The whole point of MIME and attachments is to provide a mechanism for transmitting information of kinds which plain-text mail is not suitable for. People need to be able to send and receive such information.
Fine for the back then when webspace wasn't readily available and hosting was extorsionate, if you're sending the same e-mail with the same attachment to multiple people, though, and some of those just aren't going to read it, including a URL to the relevant document is much nicer.
I'm wondering a bit why Mark (OP) is seeking such a solution (interesting idea though it is). I receive on average over 1000 emails a day, about 2/3 of which are pure spam (and at least half the rest are mailing-list postings which I'm not interested in reading). I have no particular difficulty, and very close to 100 per cent success, in deleting these on the receiving server before I donwload the rest, purely on the basis of apparent sender, and subject line. Total time for this: 15-20min/day.
That's 10 to 15 mins more than I spend on spam a day ;) Cron mails, now that's a different story (yay for a whole set of network booting workstations :).
Cheers,