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?
Is this really a big enough problem to be worth solving? I can't recall a
single instance where I received IETF list with a problematic attachment. OTOH,
I routinely get IETF messages with useful attachements - typically a critical
revision to a draft which for whatever reason can't be posted as an I-D - that
I really need to be able see without having to bother with some indirection.
There are also times when I have access to email but no web access. What am I
supposed to do then?
This also creates significant problems for list archiving. Right now I can
easily capture the entire content of the list and preserve it for however long
I want. Do this and that becomes significantly more difficult - I have to
detect these indirections, fetch and stuff the attachments back in, because
regardless of stated policy I cannot assume that web link will be valid for as
long as I need it to be.
I also worry about the ability of mailman to actually know what an attachment
is versus a message constructed in multiple parts. And there's also the issue
of what sort of indirection it uses. Past experience with "advanced" list
manager features like this doesn't give me a whole lot of confidence in their
MIME chops.
I suppose I could live with this - but not actively support it - if the
stripping was limited to abusively large attachments - say ones over 5Mb or
thereabouts. But otherwise it's a TERRIBLE idea, and will simply result in
everyone including the draft or whatever in the primary message text in order
to avoid this nonsense, which results in a degradation of list quality for all
concerned.
Ned