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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.
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.
try 'TOP '
returns the top n lines of the message numbered mgsnum... I use it to "preview" messages via an ssh connection when I'm at a friends house, or on a low-bandwidth connection...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
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
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.).
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.