On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 08:38:18PM +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
On 13-feb-04, at 18:56, Hadmut Danisch wrote:
Example: Before sending the 5 GByte E-Mail, a short control
message could be sent to the recipient, where every relay
can reduce the maximum Mail size. Then the message is sent back.
This would of course not be a guarantee, since the path can
change every second. But it's at least a hint and could avoid
the 5 GByte to be sent just for generating an error message.
This makes sense, but I think we can go a little further and see
whether it's necessary to push large messages and especially files out
to the recipient's inbox anyway, why not just send a light-weight
message indiciating the availability of the "real" message or the file
in question, and then the receiver can connect to the place where the
message/file is stored and then the file is transmitted to the place
where it needs to be directly. Additionaly, we can add an optional
proxy layer here, allowing for extremely efficient distribution of
binary information through mailinglists.
So a software maker could send out a message with attached a file that
contains a large update to all their customers. The customers all
receive the message and then proceed to download the file, if they want
to have it, through their ISP's proxy. This
Hey, that's a good point. I often asked several friends to
not send monster files and jam my mailbox, but to put them on a
webserver and just sent the link.
So we should support push and pull attachments. Instead of an
attachment a URL and a cookie is included which allows to pull
an attachment which is to be deleted after downloading.
I think that's a good requirement.
BTW: If we are talking about large messages or attachments:
Should we require every implementation to use 64bit integers
to avoid inherent size limits of 4 GB (or 2 GB with signed
integers)?
Or should we have a hard size limit? When you transmit
4 GB, and the last byte fails, you need to transmit it again.
Should we simply disallow 4GB transfers and enforce pulling
attachments?
Or should we support incremental transport? Just open another
connection and transmit just the last 1kb instead of transmitting
the 4 GB again?
regards
Hadmut