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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?"
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.
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.
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
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.