Separate Web Pages for Large Attachments? 70
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?"
Re:uh (Score:1)
Re:uh (Score:1)
Re:uh | one problem (Score:1)
I feel the same as you. Email was not created to transfer gigantic files but, thanks to marketing, it has become the universal way to transfer files on the net. My boss gets ticked off every time he gets an SMTP error after trying to send a 10mb attachment. It is even worse when he realizes that he did not get an email b/c someone tried to send him an 80mb PowerPoint over email (NOT JOKING). He expects it to "just to work". That is fairly standard among the common computer users
good luck (Score:1)
and that is an unrealistic expectation?
At the office my wife works in, she was lauded by the IT guy because she was the only one there who actually knew how to "cut and paste".
These are the kind of people that are USING the technology. They really do not understand how or why it works.
And they don't want to hear a lecture about it. They just want it to work.
Webpage View of Large Emails (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Webpage View of Large Emails (Score:2)
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
webmail (Score:1)
It's a dialup connection -- it's SLOW EITHER WAY! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's a dialup connection -- it's SLOW EITHER WA (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
This has been my experience with Microsoft Entourage, Netscape Mail, Eudora, Apple Mail.app, Pine and a WebMail [netwinsite.com] system which accesses th
Re:It's a dialup connection -- it's SLOW EITHER WA (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
...And you're not working blind. (Score:2)
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
Re:It's a dialup connection -- it's SLOW EITHER WA (Score:1)
Re:It's a dialup connection -- it's SLOW EITHER WA (Score:2)
Re:It's a dialup connection -- it's SLOW EITHER WA (Score:1)
Re:It's a dialup connection -- it's SLOW EITHER WA (Score:2)
Sorry
Re:It's a dialup connection -- it's SLOW EITHER WA (Score:1)
Err.. (Score:2)
Re:Err.. (Score:2)
Re:Err.. (Score:3, Informative)
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...
Re:Err.. (Score:2)
How large is large? (Score:1)
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 1024859857 Nov 28 00:36 dfhAR0j0jj004819
-rw------- 1 root smmsp 1290067803 Nov 28 09:31 dfhAR9WRji005135
Re:How large is large? (Score:2)
Re:How large is large? (Score:2)
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
Tech support question of the day (Score:1)
"Hey Rob, can you help me email this folder of last years Powerpoint presentations to Judy over in Marketing?"
Re:How large is large? (Score:2)
Earthlink (Score:1)
Re:Earthlink (Score:1)
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)
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)
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)
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?"
Re:SMTP Body size (Score:2)
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..
Re:SMTP Body size (Score:1)
Re:SMTP Body size (Score:2)
Generally speaking, anyway
Mailwasher (Score:2, Informative)
Webmail Solution (Score:1)
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).
Webmail. Next Question? (Score:2)
Just dont lock the mailbox (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Just dont lock the mailbox (Score:1)
--
lds
Re:Just dont lock the mailbox (Score:2)
Sam
Re:Just dont lock the mailbox (Score:1)
My $0.02
Mailstart (or any other webmail system...) (Score:2)
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
SMTP is the "new" fileshare protocol... (Score:2)
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
Re:SMTP is the "new" fileshare protocol... (Score:1)
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
Re:SMTP is the "new" fileshare protocol... (Score:1)
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
Don't use email (Score:2)
Also, to get around your problem, use a provider that has webmail.
It's called a quota. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:It's called a quota. (Score:1)
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.
Re:It's called a quota. (Score:1)
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)
Re:It's called a quota. (Score:2)
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
Get a Virtual Server (Score:1)
My ISP has a system like that (Score:2)
Web Interfaces (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course the higher ups didn't like us sending people to something outside our own system, so we got a memo sayin
Try a client that only downloads header info (Score:1)
Sadly... (Score:1)
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
whale mail (Score:1)
-calyxa
I work at an ISP. (Score:1)
Incomming E-mail Size Limit. (Score:1)
However, I am unsure as to what the RFC's might say about doing something like this.