Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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
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.
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.
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