Subject: Re: Email messages: How large is too large?

From: "J. Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 16:30:25 -0500

> From: Jon Knight <[email-masked]>

    > sending an email with a large Word attachment to all 15000 users on
    > campus isn't a good idea as our mail servers will melt. ... especially
    > from non-academic departments who are used to doing paper based mass
    > mailings to students. ... depite us offering to put the Word document
    > on a web page and then send a small email pointing at it

This is an important distinction to make, between sending a large item to one
person who know's it's coming (which I view as an acceptable way to transfer
something from one person to another - but more on this below), and sending
it to an entire mailing list, most of whom won't be interested in the item.
Resources are far better used here by putting the item up for retrieval, so
that only those who are interested in it expend the resources to get a copy.

The caveat about using the email system to transfer things from one user to
another is that it is, after all, an *email* system, and engineered for that,
not a generic bulk-data-transfer system. To use a real-world analogy, the
post-office may take parcels, but above a certain size, you have to switch to
a shipping company, which is set up to deal with larger items. In a similar
vein, the email system was designed for certain characteristic payloads,
particularly size - i.e. *email*.

	Noel

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From: "Michael H. Warfield" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 17:20:48 -0500

> that only those who are interested in it expend the resources to get a copy.

	The only problem with that is that the inDUHviduals who are at the
heart of the problem are the very ones who will have no clue about what that
distinction is.  Most of the time, they don't even realize they are sending
a monsterous bloated blob.  One person I have in mind knocked her manager
off mail by sending a monster to her entire department and his download then
started timing out.  She later asked me "well, just how am I suppose to tell
how big it is in the first place?"  One person told me that they didn't
understand why they needed to learn how to something like "zip".  It wasn't
important to their jobs so why should they have to learn it.

	These are the people we are going to try and tell "you can send it
to one person if they are expecting it but don't send it to a list" (what's
a list - remember aliases) "and they're not".  That's only going to trade
one brand of confusion for another.

	[...]

-- 
 Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  [email-masked]
  (The Mad Wizard)      |  (770) 331-2437   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
  NIC whois:  MHW9      |  An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471    |  possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

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From: "Michael H. Warfield" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 17:20:48 -0500

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