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Data Storage The Internet

Separate Web Pages for Large Attachments? 70

Posted by Cliff from the making-mail-less-of-a-chore dept.
digitalsushi asks: "Are there any small Dialup ISPs out there that have the option to automatically save their customer's email attachments to a private web site? How do Dialup ISPs continually manage to deal when people email their customers huge media files, only to lock the mailbox into a 5 hour download? It seems that there must be some solution other than calling tech support every time the customer gets a giant email. What are the Dialup ISPs doing to protect themselves with limited resources?"
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Separate Web Pages for Large Attachments? More

Separate Web Pages for Large Attachments?

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  • Webpage View of Large Emails (Score:5, Informative)

    by xWeston ( 577162 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @03:35AM (#7983131)
    When I was on Dialup with Pacific Bell as well as a couple of other companies, they had a webpage that you could login to in order to see the large emails that were in your account. You could delete any ones that you did not want to keep and then you'd just have to wait for the other ones that you wanted to download.

    I think this solution works fine and it will take a long time whether the customer downloads it from a website or through their email client. This utility just allows people to not download something that isnt necessary.
    • they had a webpage that you could login to in order to see the large emails that were in your account

      This is different from webmail (I.E. only for large messages)? I would think that webmail would be pretty common for ISPs, maybe it isn't.

      Just today I set up my mother's email account (she had been offline for about a year and SPAM has gotten much worse since), installed Mailwasher and explained how it works. I really like this program - I have no affiliation with the product - as it's free and easy to
  • Set up a webmail system (twig, imp, squirrell...) so they don't download attachments unless they want to.
  • What difference does it make whether it takes 4 hours to download the email or 4 hours to download the file from the web site?
    • Easy; if someone sends them a 977M file they want, they can choose to spend the next 6 days downloading it at 56kbps, or they can forward it (without needing to download it first) to a friend who has broadband and can download it in a half-hour.

      If it's junk, they can choose to delete it.

      IMAP allows this to some extent, but you can really only read the headers. Webmail lets you read the text/html parts and see how many megs the attachment is, before you start downloading it.

      • IMAP helps (Score:3, Informative)

        by extra88 ( 1003 )
        It sounds like you've never used an IMAP client. If you open a message using an IMAP client, it does not download attachments along with the body of the mesage. Also, the size of attachments is recorded in the message headers so you can see an attachment's filename, see how large it is and choose to download it, delete it, or leave it on the server attached to the message.

        This has been my experience with Microsoft Entourage, Netscape Mail, Eudora, Apple Mail.app, Pine and a WebMail [netwinsite.com] system which accesses th

    • Mail attachments are usually transfered base64-encoded, thus having an overhead of about 33%. If the server decodes the attachments and lets the user download them using HTTP(S), there is only a very small, nearly constant overhead of the HTTP protocol headers, as HTTP itself is "8-bit clean". So if you download already-decoded large attachments using HTTP, you save about 25% compared to POP3. If browser and HTTP server can agree to using gzip transfer encoding (see gzip_cnc project [schroepl.net]; most browsers support i

    • You can use a download manager. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chrestomanci ( 558400 ) * <{david} {at} {chrestomanci.org}> on Thursday January 15, 2004 @06:28AM (#7983780)
      If you attempt to download the huge e-mail via pop3, and the transfer aborts, you have to start again.

      with a webmail like interface, you can use a download manager to fetch it reliably.

      A good interface would also show mutiple attachment seperately, so that individual parts can be downloaded one by one. This would be usefull if someone sends you a bunch of digital photos, all attached to one e-mail.

      • With POP, your mail program grabs the files without your asking. For those people using Outlook (assuming it hasn't changed since I did tech support for an ISP), they only have an indication as to what number message they're on.

        So, when they've been sitting there for 10 minutes, and it hasn't progressed, they think something's wrong, break the connection, and try again.

        With a web based mail client, you know there's an attachment ahead of time, and with good ones, it'll give you an indication of size, so
    • Actually, unless things have changed a bunch, downloading an attachment via POP3 will always be much slower than downloading the same file via HTTP. The email spec has certain requirements for formatting of the message, such that all attachments must be encoded as text. This text can be 25-50% larger than the same data in binary.
    • Well, for one thing, if you are forced to download the attachmnet, you need to wait until it's done before getting to any mail stack up behind it. By using a web interface you can check your other messages, then go back to the one with the big attachment.
  • Are we trying to help the users downloading the large files? Honestly, I don't get many, but aren't there some email programs that only get the headers, and then you can decide if you want the rest of the email? Maybe adding an option to the thing to only get the body (though, from what I understand this isn't really possible. You could keep getting ever larger chunks of the email until you reached the attachment boundary, but I think that's it?), or to only get the first 5k of an email that's more than
    • I hate to reply to myself, but I just looked at the POP3 RFC again. I don't see a way to get just the beginning X amount of an email, yet I'm sure there's programs that do it somehow. You'd think I'd have remembered this, since I had to write a pop3 client for a class just this semester. Bleh.

      • Re:Err.. (Score:3, Informative)

        by stoborrobots ( 577882 )
        try 'TOP <msgnum> <n>'

        returns the top n lines of the message numbered mgsnum... I use it to "preview" messages via an ssh connection when I'm at a friends house, or on a low-bandwidth connection...
  • Only marginally on topic, but I felt I had to post this;

    -rw------- 1 root smmsp 1024859857 Nov 28 00:36 dfhAR0j0jj004819
    -rw------- 1 root smmsp 1290067803 Nov 28 09:31 dfhAR9WRji005135

    • who sends such large files via email, it seems retarted to me as encoding them in MIME (or uu, et al) increases the file size by a significant part. Why not use protocols better suited for exchanging files, especially those that support resume etc.
      • "who sends such large files via email,"

        IME - PHBs and secretaries who have just about managed to grasp the concept of using computers as a means of communication (yet insist on printing out any emils you send them to read and then, if you're really, really, lucky to get the context, top-posting a reply - that's if they don't write on the printout and send that around..) but haven't worked out that immense PDFs or other documents with masses of embedded images take up a lot of space. There has been more tha
  • Not exactly a small ISP, but Earthlink has a webmail feature which allows you to open the message and determine from the email/filename if you want to download the file. If not, you can delete the email without having to wait an hour for the 10-meg attachment to finish downloading. On broadband, the webmail feature kinda sucks...but on dialup it's a lifesaver.
    • I tried this a few times (to pre-delete spam), and found that just displaying the headers marked the message as read when I downloaded them later in Eudora, regardless of whether or not I actually opened the message.

      Inconvenient enough for me that I quit using the feature after the first few times. Dunno if it's changed since then. ---PCJ

  • suggestion (Score:5, Informative)

    by astrashe ( 7452 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @04:06AM (#7983268) Journal
    A lot of mail clients let you pass on large emails -- you can set a size limit in the client's configuration.

    That would let you pop your mail off in a timely fashion.

    To get the attachments, you could use the ISP's webmail interface.

  • Webmail: Download/Stream (Score:3, Informative)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Thursday January 15, 2004 @04:11AM (#7983298) Homepage Journal
    I'm with Optus dialup. Their Webmail lets me download or stream any attachment, or just delete the whole message. Easy to cull out, even with a quick sample first, any big attachement.

    However, I'm not on the distro list of anyone that thinks that mailing around viral marketing advertising videos is a Good Thing(TM), so the problem hasn't really come up.

  • SMTP Body size (Score:4, Funny)

    by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @04:31AM (#7983375) Journal
    set to 5M. Bounce email if larger. Problem solved.

    I had to do this to a server at a company I used to work at, as people are clueless about file sizes, and we had a 33.6k link to the rest of the internet. Otherwise I'd get :
    Boss: "Hey my very-important-email to very-important-client hasn't made it! I sent it an hour ago! It was only a 40k spreadsheet, where is it!?"
    Me: "I'll just check the mail queue...."
    (Me discovers a 5M junk video file , cc'd to 6 people in the queue, which has been busy transferring for 4 hours. This is promptly removed.)
    Me: "Your email will be there in 5 minutes"
    Boss: "I thought email was supposed to be fast?"

    • Once you have two servers that each to this, and someone sends a big message with forged headers (or from either of the servers) you have a loop.

      I'm not really into bounces, since they have the habbit of developing into loops, which have the habbit of causing problems with free space on server..

      • All bounces are sent from , they can't loop.
      • Well, they don't actually *bounce* as such, in the initial smtp transaction the originating server says "SIZE xxxxxxxxx" and the receiving server can terminate it at that point with a 5xx error if they wish. The sending server then has the option of reporting back to the user that the message has failed. (normally with the text of the 5xx error message, which in my case says "5M limit on incoming messages - contact xxx@yyy for info"

        Generally speaking, anyway ;-)

  • Mailwasher (Score:2, Informative)

    by dickiedoodles ( 728410 )
    mailwasher [mailwasher.net] is free (as in beer) lets you log into any pop3 server and preview the messages that are on it and delete and/or bounce any mail you don't want without having to download it. This is helpfully if someone sends you a huge e-mail and you don't want to waste hours downloading it.
  • The best thing to do would be to either send them to your webmail page or if you don't have webmail setup send them to www.mail2web.com
    That site used to save me all of the time when I was using dialup.

    To save yourself a "help me" call just setup a simple Support page and put direction with screenshots and most people will be able to handle the problem themselves(or at least only have to call about it once).
  • Oh, and bouncing *stupidly* big messages is a good idea: in the days of Word not storing images in compressed format, but rather as a full BMP, secretaries were caught mailing out 40MB attachments *all the time* here.

  • Just dont lock the mailbox (Score:4, Interesting)

    by samjam ( 256347 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @09:09AM (#7984422) Homepage Journal
    An ISP I had something to do with moved to courier IMAP.

    1) It doesn't LOCK the mailbox, there is not need to LOCK anything. Each mail message is a seperate file.
    1a) Yes this is not efficiant disk block usage
    1b) Yes this is efficient IO, when IMAP is supported or large mailboxes are common it is a dreadful thing to have to make a copy of the ENTIRE mailbox file every time their biff does a pop3 login!
    2) This means you can have NFS mounted mailboxes - no locking!
    3) Yes, no need to lock
    Thats the answer.
    And if the user wants a 5 hour download, at least they can get the message WITHOUT locking their mailbox, they can still webmail at the same time, or use imap.

    Sam
    • You're not really talking about Courier-IMAP so much as Maildir, DJB's quite pleasant mail storage format. All the advantages you state apply to anything using maildir for delivery; the MTA, a POP3 server, and an IMAP server can all access the mailbox simultaneusly.

      --
      lds
      • You are quite right, procmail could handle delivery to maildir anyway, so technically I should have said "use maildir format", but the significant change was also to install an imap/pop3 server that could handle the format.

        Sam
      • Courier also has an integrated webmail server, which might be good in this situation (judging by previous comments.) It's virtual account/domain support is pretty good too, and since it does POP, IMAP, SMTP, and webmail, you only have to configure stuff once.

        My $0.02
  • You could use any Pop-Webmail system. Find an ISP that offers webmail as well, or use something like Mailstart [mailstart.com]. I mention mailstart because they have a free demo, wich you can use once a week wich might be sufficient for you.
    The next thing to do is to set you mail client not to download big messages. IIRC even OE supports this. I'm certain that Pegasus Mail [pmail.com] has this feature. This way you will never be waiting for big emails unexpectedly. You can use webmail to see what it is and delete the message or down
  • "Fictional" depiction of Real Life(TM)

    Didn't you know? SMTP is the "new" fileshare protocol! Send your monolithic, uncompressed Micro$oft Word and Excel files by simply attaching them to an email and sending them to your distribution list! 300MB? No problem. 1GB? Who cares? Everyone uses Broadband now anyway, right?

    There's more truth to this than you realize. We've been battling this problem at our University for years now. Because there is no convenient, University-wide fileservers to exchange

    • I mentioned something similar in an earlier comment.

      I face that "fictional" depection daily. Why did this thought ever spawn? Well there are many reasons. One large problem is the marketing of certain large software companies. Also the creation of monolithic programs causes major problems. MS Outlook is among the offenders, but there are applications in the OSS world that also follow the trend.

      In many law offices users use Wordperfect for everything. When you tell them to open something through normal Win
    • It seems creating some kind of common WebDAV file-share and setting up something similar to what Apple provides with iDisk so every network user has personal file-sharing space would come in real handy.

      Then, you could limit the msg sizes internally (within your domain) to something like 1024Kb (or even 256Kb for that matter - how many text emails have you seen which were larger than 256Kb?)

      Then, instruct users if they want to "attach" a file, to upload it to their share (with password protection) and incl
  • You shouldn't use email for large attachments anyway. You are blocking up mail servers with large files. The mail has to stop at servers on the way to it's destination. If you really need to send large files, use FTP or some kind of IM software that supports file transfers. "large attachments" size depends on who you talk to, but I'd say for dialup not to send files larger than 2 or 3 megs. Anything more than that and it jsut takes too long.

    Also, to get around your problem, use a provider that has webmail.

  • It's called a quota. (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @12:55PM (#7986720) Journal
    Exceed quota, mail stops going in. Large emails should get a 5xx response (go away). Smaller ones should get a 4xx response (try again later).

    I don't see why anyone would want to receive > 5MB to 10MB email over the Internet. Intranet maybe. Internet, no.

    It's not like you want to encourage people to send huge emails y'know. Esp spammers.
    • this may be "informative" but hardly realistic.
      the average office worker has no clue that email system
      wasnt designed for such attachments. they dont think twice
      about sending a 12MB pagemaker file.

      I worked at a small ISP whose primary income was from thousands of business dialup users,
      and most of them used email to send large files.
      • crap, hit submit instead of preview.

        anyway.

        Try telling your main source of income they are not
        supposed to use email like that, then tell them about the
        (complicated to them) alternatives, and you will see the challenge.

        so the solution is either enforce reasonable size limits or work
        with customers who need and want higher limits to develop
        alternative methods (ftp, http indexing, whatever)
      • He's asking what Dialup ISPs are doing to protect themselves with limited resources. Doh, if resources are very limited, then ration them properly. I don't see how a decently run ISP would accept mail messages that will take their customers 5 hours to download.

        Other people can send messages as large as their ISP allows and wants to carry- most mail servers support limits on message size.

        However the recipient's ISP may have different message size limits and quotas, depending on service type (broadband, dia
  • The solution to this problem is to get yourself a Virtual Dedicated Server. The technology for these things is so mature, you can get yourself what seems like a dedicated FreeBSD or Linux box with 1G of space for only a few bucks a month. And if $20+ is too much money, you can share it with your firends and relatives. Have your mail routed to that server and then use IMAP (preferably over SSL) read your e-mail. If you get a large attachment - just log in the the server using ssh, fire up your favorite clie
  • The ISP I work for has a system that each customer can sign up for, whereby any attachment over a certain size (default 4MB) gets put in a quarantine area for them to download at a later time. The customer also then gets an email about the large mail so they know one's waiting for them. It's a custom in-house system, though.

  • Web Interfaces (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Chance Wheeler ( 129469 )
    When I was working for tech support for Earthlink I often sent people to our webmail system to show them how to solve the problems. Earthlinks servers got funky if you had any attachments over 1 meg. Since Earthlink has trouble keeping systems running reliably, I also had people go through www.mail2web.com, which always seems to work. It can turn any POP3 or IMAP4 Server into a webmail service.

    Of course the higher ups didn't like us sending people to something outside our own system, so we got a memo sayin
  • Something like JBMail (http://www.pc-tools.net/win32/trialware/jbmail.ht ml) allows you to look at the to, from, and size and delete the offending junk. I used it corporately when some people send huge attachments that don't clear (because the Pres. says don't block based on size...sheeesh!) Also good for checking mail server status.
  • At the ISP for which I work, while we are generally on top of things customer service-wise, the procedure goes something like this:

    Customer: "I can't download my email!"
    Me: $ cd ~customer/Maildir; ls -s cur
    Me: "There's a VERY large message here. I'll delete it."
    Customer: "I'll tell them to stop sending those videos.

    Our outsource support for after hours service recommends mail2web.com

    Suffice to say that we need to implement a solution. Sadly, webmail is a HUGE resource hog as far as we've seen, so w
  • maybe whale mail [whalemail.com] would be the answer? I only used it once or twice a couple years ago, but it seems to still be around....

    -calyxa

  • I work at an ISP and we get the occasional call from someone saying that their email "isn't working." Usually this means that they have a giant email clogging it, or that somehow they changed their settings to NOT download messages from the server and something hiccups so it tries to download all three thousand since they had the account. We do offer webmail services, but that's often far over the head of most people to even consider. They call us first.
  • Working at a small time ISP, with an under-nourished mail system for 40,000 custmomers... we've had to draw a line, and simply bounce any incomming e-mail over 6MB in size.

    However, I am unsure as to what the RFC's might say about doing something like this.

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