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?"

Comments

Just dont lock the mailbox

[samjam]

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