From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-01-07T15:39:10+09:00
Subject: Re: A very  humour game

On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, 3:57:37 PM, Dossy wrote:

> 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.

What's the difference between an attached code sample and an inline
code sample?  Not much, in my opinion.  The bandwidth argument applies
to a lot of things: HTML, off-topic posts, etc.  Why pick on
potentially on-topic and useful attachments?

For a code sample, putting it on a web site and publishing the URL
seems like a punitive amount of effort.

I think there should be an upper limit to the size of messages in this
list, regardless of attachments.

A quick survey of the last couple of months leads me to the conclusion
that of all the posts above 10K:
 - two were useful/original
 - two were banal replies that didn't snip enough
 - two were bloated HTML messages
 - one contained a picture of the pope as an attachment
 - one contained significant Ruby code as an attachment

I would therefore set the limit at 20K for a message.  This would
actually exclude that last item, but he could resend after zipping -
not exacly a bad idea.

One thing's for sure.  100Kb+ spam messages make me mad.

Gavin