From: Mike Campbell <michael_s_campbell@...>
Date: 2003-09-13T23:13:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and NNTP attachments

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hal Fulton [mailto:hal9000@hypermetrics.com]
> Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2003 4:17 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Ruby and NNTP attachments
>
>
> I've been playing with NNTP a day or two.
>
> The lib by Jeff Heard and Ward Wouts seems to work fine
> for me, but I'm clueless about attachments.
>
> What's the deal? Does Usenet universally know MIME
> nowadays, or do we still do uuencoding?
>
> Either way, how do I make it work? Do I have to worry
> about a max size?



I've seen less and less uuencoding over the years, but it's still around.
Something I see a lot of lately in the binary newsgroups is "yenc"
(http://www.yenc.org).  As a counterpoint, check out
http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/yenc.html, but I don't think jeremy's doing
much more than tilting at windmills, frankly.

As for size, one accepted "standard" size I see is to break up your posts into
roughly 472500 to 315000 bytes per segment, "for best propagation".
(http://www.faqs.org/faqs/music/mp3/newsgroups-faq/ , section 4.13)  Your goal
may not BE propogation, so that argument may not be relevant.