Some suggestions have been made about the IETF mail lists.
There is a way for mailman to strip attachments and put them
in a place for downloading with a web browser. This would be
a significant change to current practice, so the community
needs to consider this potential policy change.
What do you think?
Russ
The only bug in the soup is that it seemed to me that we might
want to look into an alternative approach. We have asked people
to post large documents somewhere and only send a pointer. Not
everyone can do that, lots of people forget, and some people are
just not willing to take the extra step.
Plus, we cannot expect people to keep things posted on their own
personal, or their company's, web-site indefinitely. If they
don't keep it there, then the pointer in the archive will become
stale, and information that should probably be there is lost.
So we need a solution to the issue with really big email messages
sometime.
One solution might be to simpy strip attachments off, put them
in the archive and replace them with a pointer. That shouldn't
be that hard, since a lot of anti-virus software does something
similar with suspect attachment types.
Or we could - once again - ask people to post attachments and use
a pointer in their mail, only provide them with a place to post
them in the same general area as the mail archive.
If there is already something like this in place, please let me
know what it is and I will add a pointer to it in my "too big"
rejection messages.
The thing about threaded messages getting too big is a slightly
different issue, brought about by the increasing use of HTML
format email. I talked years ago about this with Scott Bradner
because I really think that HTML format messages are useful and
relatively easy to read when compared to plain old text.
But using HTML leads to messages that are deceptively big.
Possibly the right answer in that case is to bump the size limit
up to maybe 100K. Even with HTML format, people will many likely
realize that nobody is going to read past the 10th back message
in any case (or if they do want to, they can look at the thread
in the archive).
But even that approach is not fool proof, and there are a lot of
resourceful fools out there.
Just trying to be creative, and help out...