List Attachments? (Was: RE: VIRUS ON THIS LIST) (fwd)

[Bill D Michael]

The HTML and VCARD junk is most annoying, and of course those who have
fallen for the Microsoft line are susceptible to these viruses as well.  As
I run a similar "support" list myself for another product, I've already
fought with these same issues. I finally decided to ban attachments
altogether, and provided an ftp "dropbox" for file exchange. Web/ftp space
is cheap (or free in small amounts) and ANY kind or size of attachment is
going to bother the people who don't need it/care about it. Cognos could
get a few meg for listers use on some free ftp site quite easily. (Not the
Cognos site, please! Firewalls flat don't work for this.) Putting a
(properly constructed) URL link to the file in a mail message allows
single-click access to the file anyway; hardly less convenient than having
it attached. I've had zero complaints.

I say block 'em.

Bill


<snip>
o Messages are already limited to ~40KB and thus most attachments are
  likely too big.
o Attachments are, in my opinion, more efficiently distributed as a
  referenced web or ftp document on a poster maintained site, thus saving
  the diskspace of the uninterested and the bandwidth of all, most notably
  the list host network.
o A significant percentage of attachments I see are in what I would
  categorize as annoying, at least to me personally.  These would include
  a text/html copy of the message, the VCARD stuff, and most
  recently, viruses that eat Microsoft installations for lunch.



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