Re: Pictures/Attachments STILL NOT ALLOWED on the list!

[Tom Jennings <tomj@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Jock J Jocewicz wrote:

>  I am not that computer smart but would like to know why
> pictures/attachments aren't allowed on the list?

Most mailing lists forbid attachments and especially images. It's
due to the way email is distributed.

When you post your one message, the mailing list program makes a
copy of that message one per destination -- one per person getting
postings directly, eg. not in digest form. Each copy has a To:
address etc and is queued up for delivery. Most are delivered in a
few seconds, some take a lot longer, but during those few seconds
there might be 100 or 1000 copies of your message sitting on a
disk.


If your posting is 500 characters long, 100 messages times 500
characters is only 50,000 bytes of disk space (50K).

Images right out of a digital camera are often a megabyte each.
Attached to a message, 100 copies are now over 100 megabytes.
Even that's not too bad these days; but if there's an internet
outage or problem delivering email for minutes, or hours, the
files really pile up.

It's not just the side of the 'payload' (message+image); there's a
lot of tracking overhead, which can make the lis mailer get really
slow, which means more come in before it's delivered the last
batch...

One pernicious problem is that a lot of sites (AOL, etc) don't
accept messages over some particular size; the poor list mailer
can't know this, and tries over and over again to deliver a huge
message, send out most of the data then getting cut off, wasting
even more delivery time, consuming more space, which consumes more
time, more messages come in...

The list server falls over dead and the poor sysadmin has to look
in the logs to see who's causing the !@#$% clog, manually delete
those messages, temporarily block incoming posts, get the old
flushed out, etc.



Basic internet mail is plain-text-only; it's the only universal
medium -- universal, as in absolutely every single
RFC822-compliant email client in the entire internet. When you
send non-plain-text (usually without knowing it, because client
programs like OutCrook or NetScrape push fancy features that make
them look good at everyone else's expense) it's done as an
attachment; the client on the other end (recipient) has to know
how OutLook etc attached the message, and reassemble it properly.
It's a crock.

Often when  you turn on italics, color, funny typefaces, etc it
doesn't warn you "by using these features you may be considered
impolite by others, unable to read your email goo". These
'features' often are REALLY HUGE. Plain text (like this message)
is quite compact (unlike this message).