ietf-asrg
[Top] [All Lists]

[Asrg] 0. General - Bounces and Attachments

2004-02-02 07:24:22
[Subject changed as per posting guidelines, (was Re: [Asrg] Getting SMTP "Bounce email" part of RFC changed... forget binary attachments). Mod.]

Jim Witte wrote:

This would not be TOO annoying (any more than any other worm/spam is), except that the attachments are usually anywhere from 30-150KB in size, and I'm still on a dial-up line (to say nothing of the bandwidth these bounces use as they travel through the Internet).


Many email clients have an option to download the first XXX Kbs of a message, before downloading the rest.

Furthermore, the attachments (even if they were legitimate attachments) are useless, since they are bounced by the daemon in raw hex format, and thus are not interpretable to most email readers. If a legitimate attachment got bounced, the original sender should logically have a copy of it still around. So why is the raw hex even left in the bounce message? To copy it there seems to me to server no purpose, other than to provide more incentive for people like me to get DSL (maybe a good thing, but that's another matter entirely), and clog the internet trunks (which is already happening, and may or may not matter, especially after the fiber glut of the late '90s)

Does anyone else think this makes sense and that the RFC for mailer daemons should therefore be changed (or a new RFC proposed, or however the process goes, I'm new to this, as you can tell..)


The SMTP protocol does not distinguish between attachements and non-attachements, since it usually does not parse the body of the message.

Yakov
-------
Yakov Shafranovich / asrg <at> shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / research <at> solidmatrix.com
"Some lies are easier to believe than the truth" (Dune)
-------


_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg