From: Dossy <dossy@...>
Date: 2003-01-07T13:57:37+09:00
Subject: Re: A very  humour game

On 2003.01.07, Brennan Leathers <digibren@mac.com> wrote:
> attachments are OK, certainly larger than 10K. [...]

Attachments for a technically-oriented mailing list shouldn't be OK.

With so much free web hosting, there's no excuse for people not to push
a necessary file attachment up to some webspace and publish the URL to
the resource.  Then, only people who /want/ the file(s) can go fetch
them, alleviating bandwidth requirements for all the list participants
and the list server itself.

I generally relax this "rule of thumb" for non-technical mailing lists,
as it's less likely that people will be knowledgeable enough to know how
to do this (put files up on a webserver and post URLs to them).

Disallowing file attachments at the list server stops these mail-borne
viruses most of the time.  It also prevents someone from launching a
silly denial-of-service attack against the list server by hammering it
with a ton of messages containing large file attachments.

-- Dossy

-- 
Dossy Shiobara                       mail: dossy@panoptic.com 
Panoptic Computer Network             web: http://www.panoptic.com/ 
  "He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
    folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)