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Separate Web Pages for Large Attachments?
digitalsushi asks: "Are there any small Dialup ISPs out there that have the option to automatically save their customer's email attachments to a private web site? How do Dialup ISPs continually manage to deal when people email their customers huge media files, only to lock the mailbox into a 5 hour download? It seems that there must be some solution other than calling tech support every time the customer gets a giant email. What are the Dialup ISPs doing to protect themselves with limited resources?"
if you use imap you can see the size when you list and if it's too big you can delete it. problem solved
When I was on Dialup with Pacific Bell as well as a couple of other companies, they had a webpage that you could login to in order to see the large emails that were in your account. You could delete any ones that you did not want to keep and then you'd just have to wait for the other ones that you wanted to download.
I think this solution works fine and it will take a long time whether the customer downloads it from a website or through their email client. This utility just allows people to not download something that isnt necessary.
Set up a webmail system (twig, imp, squirrell...) so they don't download attachments unless they want to.
What difference does it make whether it takes 4 hours to download the email or 4 hours to download the file from the web site?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Are we trying to help the users downloading the large files? Honestly, I don't get many, but aren't there some email programs that only get the headers, and then you can decide if you want the rest of the email? Maybe adding an option to the thing to only get the body (though, from what I understand this isn't really possible. You could keep getting ever larger chunks of the email until you reached the attachment boundary, but I think that's it?), or to only get the first 5k of an email that's more than say 15k (how often are they longer than that when they don't have an attachment?) Why exactly should it be the ISP's job to deal with this?
Only marginally on topic, but I felt I had to post this;
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 1024859857 Nov 28 00:36 dfhAR0j0jj004819
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 1290067803 Nov 28 09:31 dfhAR9WRji005135
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Not exactly a small ISP, but Earthlink has a webmail feature which allows you to open the message and determine from the email/filename if you want to download the file. If not, you can delete the email without having to wait an hour for the 10-meg attachment to finish downloading. On broadband, the webmail feature kinda sucks...but on dialup it's a lifesaver.
--- "...And everybody died!!! Except for me, of course...you know why? Because I had my tray table up...and my seat ba
Easy; if someone sends them a 977M file they want, they can choose to spend the next 6 days downloading it at 56kbps, or they can forward it (without needing to download it first) to a friend who has broadband and can download it in a half-hour.
If it's junk, they can choose to delete it.
IMAP allows this to some extent, but you can really only read the headers. Webmail lets you read the text/html parts and see how many megs the attachment is, before you start downloading it.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
A lot of mail clients let you pass on large emails -- you can set a size limit in the client's configuration.
That would let you pop your mail off in a timely fashion.
To get the attachments, you could use the ISP's webmail interface.
However, I'm not on the distro list of anyone that thinks that mailing around viral marketing advertising videos is a Good Thing(TM), so the problem hasn't really come up.
set to 5M. Bounce email if larger. Problem solved.
:
I had to do this to a server at a company I used to work at, as people are clueless about file sizes, and we had a 33.6k link to the rest of the internet. Otherwise I'd get
Boss: "Hey my very-important-email to very-important-client hasn't made it! I sent it an hour ago! It was only a 40k spreadsheet, where is it!?"
Me: "I'll just check the mail queue...."
(Me discovers a 5M junk video file , cc'd to 6 people in the queue, which has been busy transferring for 4 hours. This is promptly removed.)
Me: "Your email will be there in 5 minutes"
Boss: "I thought email was supposed to be fast?"
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
mailwasher is free (as in beer) lets you log into any pop3 server and preview the messages that are on it and delete and/or bounce any mail you don't want without having to download it. This is helpfully if someone sends you a huge e-mail and you don't want to waste hours downloading it.
In Soviet Russia Slashdot cliches use you
Mail attachments are usually transfered base64-encoded, thus having an overhead of about 33%. If the server decodes the attachments and lets the user download them using HTTP(S), there is only a very small, nearly constant overhead of the HTTP protocol headers, as HTTP itself is "8-bit clean". So if you download already-decoded large attachments using HTTP, you save about 25% compared to POP3. If browser and HTTP server can agree to using gzip transfer encoding (see gzip_cnc project; most browsers support it), you can save even more.
Nevertheless, I don't want my provider to mess around with my emails, especially I want the attachments within the emails, not a "click here within the next three days" link. It would make archiving emails much harder if I had to download each attachment separately.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
The best thing to do would be to either send them to your webmail page or if you don't have webmail setup send them to www.mail2web.com
That site used to save me all of the time when I was using dialup.
To save yourself a "help me" call just setup a simple Support page and put direction with screenshots and most people will be able to handle the problem themselves(or at least only have to call about it once).
We don't need no stinking sig!
If you attempt to download the huge e-mail via pop3, and the transfer aborts, you have to start again.
with a webmail like interface, you can use a download manager to fetch it reliably.
A good interface would also show mutiple attachment seperately, so that individual parts can be downloaded one by one. This would be usefull if someone sends you a bunch of digital photos, all attached to one e-mail.
Oh, and bouncing *stupidly* big messages is a good idea: in the days of Word not storing images in compressed format, but rather as a full BMP, secretaries were caught mailing out 40MB attachments *all the time* here.
I know that some ISPs use a web cache to speed things up. This saves them the cost of bandwidth, to a degree. If a file is downloaded, such as directx9.0b by user 1 by the time that user 2 downloads it from the MS website, they're actually downloading it from an invisible cache. This speeds things up.
An ISP I had something to do with moved to courier IMAP.
1) It doesn't LOCK the mailbox, there is not need to LOCK anything. Each mail message is a seperate file.
1a) Yes this is not efficiant disk block usage
1b) Yes this is efficient IO, when IMAP is supported or large mailboxes are common it is a dreadful thing to have to make a copy of the ENTIRE mailbox file every time their biff does a pop3 login!
2) This means you can have NFS mounted mailboxes - no locking!
3) Yes, no need to lock
Thats the answer.
And if the user wants a 5 hour download, at least they can get the message WITHOUT locking their mailbox, they can still webmail at the same time, or use imap.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
"Hey Rob, can you help me email this folder of last years Powerpoint presentations to Judy over in Marketing?"
It sounds like you've never used an IMAP client. If you open a message using an IMAP client, it does not download attachments along with the body of the mesage. Also, the size of attachments is recorded in the message headers so you can see an attachment's filename, see how large it is and choose to download it, delete it, or leave it on the server attached to the message.
This has been my experience with Microsoft Entourage, Netscape Mail, Eudora, Apple Mail.app, Pine and a WebMail system which accesses the mail server via IMAP (which I think is a fairly common way for 3rd party webmail programs to work.).
You could use any Pop-Webmail system. Find an ISP that offers webmail as well, or use something like Mailstart. I mention mailstart because they have a free demo, wich you can use once a week wich might be sufficient for you.
The next thing to do is to set you mail client not to download big messages. IIRC even OE supports this. I'm certain that Pegasus Mail has this feature. This way you will never be waiting for big emails unexpectedly. You can use webmail to see what it is and delete the message or download the attachment...
Actually, unless things have changed a bunch, downloading an attachment via POP3 will always be much slower than downloading the same file via HTTP. The email spec has certain requirements for formatting of the message, such that all attachments must be encoded as text. This text can be 25-50% larger than the same data in binary.
There's more truth to this than you realize. We've been battling this problem at our University for years now. Because there is no convenient, University-wide fileservers to exchange data on, people simply use email. Frankly, it's a waste of bandwidth and taxes the email servers unnecessarily.
I would love to intercept large attachments and publish them via a secured, anonymous website or ftp site. The MIME specification provides for external attachments for this very reason. If anyone comes up with a Free Software SMTP attachment-filtering gateway, please let us know! Perhaps a plugin for amavisd-ng or spamassassin would be the answer!
assert(expired(knowledge));
You shouldn't use email for large attachments anyway. You are blocking up mail servers with large files. The mail has to stop at servers on the way to it's destination. If you really need to send large files, use FTP or some kind of IM software that supports file transfers. "large attachments" size depends on who you talk to, but I'd say for dialup not to send files larger than 2 or 3 megs. Anything more than that and it jsut takes too long.
Also, to get around your problem, use a provider that has webmail. Then you can see the messages before you download the attachments.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Exceed quota, mail stops going in. Large emails should get a 5xx response (go away). Smaller ones should get a 4xx response (try again later).
I don't see why anyone would want to receive > 5MB to 10MB email over the Internet. Intranet maybe. Internet, no.
It's not like you want to encourage people to send huge emails y'know. Esp spammers.
With a little creative scripting, the task of saving the attachement can be easily automated.
Another advantage is that your mail server does not depend on your dial-up ISP - dump it any time you want for another one, and your mail account is not affected.
P.S. This post is meant as a blatant ad, but yes, such a server can be obtained by clicking on the link in my signature.
The ISP I work for has a system that each customer can sign up for, whereby any attachment over a certain size (default 4MB) gets put in a quarantine area for them to download at a later time. The customer also then gets an email about the large mail so they know one's waiting for them. It's a custom in-house system, though.
Well, for one thing, if you are forced to download the attachmnet, you need to wait until it's done before getting to any mail stack up behind it. By using a web interface you can check your other messages, then go back to the one with the big attachment.
When I was working for tech support for Earthlink I often sent people to our webmail system to show them how to solve the problems. Earthlinks servers got funky if you had any attachments over 1 meg. Since Earthlink has trouble keeping systems running reliably, I also had people go through www.mail2web.com, which always seems to work. It can turn any POP3 or IMAP4 Server into a webmail service.
Of course the higher ups didn't like us sending people to something outside our own system, so we got a memo saying to only use Earthlinks webmail, but when that was down we still sent people to Mail2Web
Something like JBMail (http://www.pc-tools.net/win32/trialware/jbmail.ht ml) allows you to look at the to, from, and size and delete the offending junk.
I used it corporately when some people send huge attachments that don't clear (because the Pres. says don't block based on size...sheeesh!)
Also good for checking mail server status.
About 5 or 6 years ago I was using dialup and a friend Warezed me a copy of a program. It was huge by those standards, 16MB, it seemed to take forever for my 28.8 model to download it all.
What happened was they locked the mailbox up. I had to call tech support and they gave me an FTP address that I had to use to download my attachment. I think that this is reasonable. If you're using dialup (which I am as I type this), you can't expect your provider to tie up countless megabytes on their mail server just so you can warez some software.
Guess why I'm anonymous...
What if they need the file?
I feel the same as you. Email was not created to transfer gigantic files but, thanks to marketing, it has become the universal way to transfer files on the net. My boss gets ticked off every time he gets an SMTP error after trying to send a 10mb attachment. It is even worse when he realizes that he did not get an email b/c someone tried to send him an 80mb PowerPoint over email (NOT JOKING). He expects it to "just to work". That is fairly standard among the common computer users. That is like expecting a car to go left when you steer right. THERE ARE RULES.
An SMTP server that auto magically routes large files to an http or ftp server, creating a unique login and all. That would be a dream for administrators that must deal with the ignorant users of the world.
But that brings up a greater problem. Do we just follow the common user and make everything work wonderfully. OR do we teach them RULES and STANDARDS. I say we teach them. The major problem exists in companies that build their software to be 'user friendly' and try not to offend users by saying "that is the wrong way to do it".
I doubt we will see a change in our lifetime. Certain corporations will continue to dumb things down and not require people to THINK.
At the ISP for which I work, while we are generally on top of things customer service-wise, the procedure goes something like this:
...now if we could just keep Outlook, Norton, and McAffee to stop locking up when they re-download messages they've already seen... I'm tired of the
Customer: "I can't download my email!"
Me: $ cd ~customer/Maildir; ls -s cur
Me: "There's a VERY large message here. I'll delete it."
Customer: "I'll tell them to stop sending those videos.
Our outsource support for after hours service recommends mail2web.com
Suffice to say that we need to implement a solution. Sadly, webmail is a HUGE resource hog as far as we've seen, so we're looking for solutions that won't require us to get a new building to have the space for extra racks and a generator outside for the extra power. I've read a few things here that will probably get me coding tonight.
$ cd ~customer/Maildir; rm cur/*2\,S
process that I seem to go through daily.
They don't have to download it ... just be told "theres a 50 MB file here" so they can go to a friend's with a bigger pipe, or set up a timed download for 2AM-5AM. Or whenever they're asleep.
yeah, but i'd bet the modem's compression will kick in on the pop3 text, and it ends up sorta equal
Need a Catering Connection
It makes a huge difference on my 26.4 connection (yes, I'm way out in the boonies). Does hardware compression work for TCP/IP, or just straight xmodem-style text?
Ok, it looks like my off the hip comment is way off base, googling around shows that modem compression doesn't really do a whole lot, except in theory.
Sorry
Need a Catering Connection
-calyxa
Decay! Decay! Decay! -Helium
With POP, your mail program grabs the files without your asking. For those people using Outlook (assuming it hasn't changed since I did tech support for an ISP), they only have an indication as to what number message they're on.
... she gave me permission to look at her mail, and I found 4 large messages from the same person. She told me that was her brother, to delete them all, and that she'd tell him to stop sending her crap]
So, when they've been sitting there for 10 minutes, and it hasn't progressed, they think something's wrong, break the connection, and try again.
With a web based mail client, you know there's an attachment ahead of time, and with good ones, it'll give you an indication of size, so you can estimate how long it'll take... and you know who it's from, and the name of it, so you can delete it if it's a duplicate, or something that you don't care about, without being forced to download it, then delete it.
[I remember once, I had someone call up -- complained her mail was broken. I checked out her mailbox size, and it was huge
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
and that is an unrealistic expectation?
At the office my wife works in, she was lauded by the IT guy because she was the only one there who actually knew how to "cut and paste".
These are the kind of people that are USING the technology. They really do not understand how or why it works.
And they don't want to hear a lecture about it. They just want it to work.
I like microcars
I work at an ISP and we get the occasional call from someone saying that their email "isn't working." Usually this means that they have a giant email clogging it, or that somehow they changed their settings to NOT download messages from the server and something hiccups so it tries to download all three thousand since they had the account. We do offer webmail services, but that's often far over the head of most people to even consider. They call us first.
you would need to provide an easy way to transfer the files safely and easily, so they have no excuse to use email
Working at a small time ISP, with an under-nourished mail system for 40,000 custmomers... we've had to draw a line, and simply bounce any incomming e-mail over 6MB in size.
However, I am unsure as to what the RFC's might say about doing something like this.
just chose Dial-up ISP that have
:)
a web mail interface alla hotmail/yahoo.
this way you can delete (or forward) the large
from THEIR server without having to get it thru
a bottleneck conection
also you can check your mail from any cafe
when you're on holiday without having the admin
painstakingly entering the SMTP/POP server
addresses into outlook (prolly the customer
doesn't even know the addresse of the smtp/pop
servers of their ISP). many ISP now
don't allow connecton originating from outside
their domain to access their pop/smtp servers
anyway
think in terms of remote control!