[AusNOG] Straw poll: what is your email message size limit?

[Scott Howard]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 6:47 PM, Ross Wheeler <ausnog at rossw.net> wrote:

> How'd they feel if they were made aware of the 33% "surcharge" file
> attachments via email are costing them (especially those sending and
> receiving them over 3G or other pay-per-byte delivery media).
>

That presumes of course that you're using a mail transfer mechanism that
converts your binaries to 6-bit.  8BITMIME has been around for close to 20
years, and it (and other similar concepts) is currently used by multiple
mail servers/clients.

Out of interest, what's the percentage overhead added by making one word in
an email red, and thus having your email client send it as HTML rather than
plain text?  I'm guessing it's more than 33%...

MIME is an (expensive) workaround to move files via a mechanism that was
> never intended to send binary data. That it does so is more a testiment to
> people ingenuity. Doesn't make it "the right tool for the job" though, even
> if mail clients DO have an "Attach" button.


http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1426 - SMTP Service Extension for
8bit-MIMEtransport - published in February 1993  (In fairness it didn't
become a standard until a few years ago, but given that it's fairly widely
implemented that doesn't seem to have held people back)

What else would you suggest people use?  Cloud web-based services introduce
all sorts of problems around compliance, archiving and data loss - and are
blocked (or at least outlawed) by a reasonable number of corporate as a
result.  Running your own web-based service isn't much better, and is
beyond what most people want to do.

  Scott
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