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?"
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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