[37962] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: EMAIL != FTP
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Mercer)
Sat May 26 02:33:19 2001
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 20:55:44 -0400
From: Jim Mercer <jim@reptiles.org>
To: Craig Partridge <craig@aland.bbn.com>
Cc: Robert Blayzor <rblayzor@thebiz.net>, nanog@nanog.org
Message-ID: <20010525205544.G9538@reptiles.org>
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In-Reply-To: <200105251534.f4PFY9P93882@aland.bbn.com>; from craig@aland.bbn.com on Fri, May 25, 2001 at 11:34:09AM -0400
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 11:34:09AM -0400, Craig Partridge wrote:
> * Email encoding is inefficient. It doesn't have to be. A zipped
> uuencoded file is often smaller than the source file and rarely
> longer. Why not update the MIME standards to encourage compression
> of binaries? This is the network operators mailing list -- you can
> certainly go to IETF with operational concerns and have credibility.
unless you intend to upgrade every server on the planet yourself, SMTP
is only 7 bit savvy.
a zipped/uuencoded file is 30%(?) bigger than just a zip file.
> Then we could block attachments that don't implement the new encoding
> and, hey, actually improve the world!
or punish those without the money to upgrade. yeah, piss on the 3rd world
and non-commercial entities, who needs em?
> * SMTP usually relays. Yes it often does. Typically you'll relay a couple
> of times. But most of those relays are at high bandwidth locations with
> lots of disk space -- they're not suffering.
excuse me?
man, i heard this 10 years ago with uucp and BITFTP.
you have no idea who, or how many relays you are going to go through.
you cannot assume that they all have cheap high bandwidth locations with
lots of disk space.
in a previous email, i talked of some 400meg emails jamming a queue.
the messages were queued to user@yahoo.com.
the server was in asia, behind a 2meg satelite link that cost $120K USD/month.
(yes, one-hundred-twenty-thousand US dollars a month)
this was actally an expensive link. generally a 2 meg link to most of the
non-western world will only cost you $30K-$50K/month.
> * A POP site may find itself storing 200 copies of the same binary.
> That's true, and a problem. There's an obvious solution: do what
> mail daemons do and share the file among mailboxes, but that solution
> increases risk of corruption (e.g. the pointer to the file gets trashed
> and you retrieve the wrong attachment).
i wouldn't be worried so much about corruption, as i would injection of a
single virus.
--
[ Jim Mercer jim@reptiles.org +1 416 410-5633 ]
[ Now with more and longer words for your reading enjoyment. ]
