On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 06:32:48AM -0400, Mitch Halmu exclaimed:
If you were a dial-up user, chances are you wouldn't be able to do that. A few simple reasons come to mind: first, you wouldn't have any or not enough disk space on your system account (limited by quota) to store the
huh? If you are limited on disk space, how is transferring it by SMTP going to help? you TOTALLY lost me on that one - either way, the user is downloading it to their local drive (or wherever they are reading their mail). So the transport method makes no difference in the disk space used. It might be stored on a different filesystem, but most systems I've seen have more space in /usr or /home than in /var anyway ... (naturally, YMMV)
file. Second, an average user probably wouldn't have the skill. Third, a
how much skill does it take to click a link and click 'OK' to a browser warning message? Good grief, users manage to download all sorts of stuff with their browsers every day, most of it harmful, frequently by accident. This argument makes no sense at all.
.zip file will usually display as funny characters on a web browser -
Oh give me a break - is there ANY modern browser that will not prompt you to save the file if it does not recognize it as a displayable format? Your reasoning is going downhill ...
that's why ftp is needed. Fourth, you probably wouldn't have shell access and ftp space from your provider with a regular account. Fifth, assuming
you don't NEED shell access or ftp space! Just click the link in your email, or copy/paste to your browser, and *poof* the file is on your local machine. This is not a difficult concept.
you would have all the toys, you would have to spend yourself the time to first upload the file, so that another may retrieve it. Sixth, if your
If you are on this list and cannot manage to upload a file to a publicly accessible server, you should not be. Period.
file was a sensitive document, others would have public access to it, etc.
you must have missed the username/password caveat in an earlier mail. Not that that's not common knowledge, or anything ...
So what's a regular user to do? Email it! Hence the legitimate use of email for transmission of large files. Most ISPs know that if they start
Just because (l)users do something does NOT legitimize it. Users use telnet to get into shell accounts too. Doesn't make it right.
limiting this privilege, users will migrate to someone that allows it.
Actually, I think users would prefer to have links in email rather than having to wait 10-15-30 minutes for mail to download, based on support calls I've received in the past.
--Mitch NetSide
-- Scott Francis scott@ [work:] v i r t u a l i s . c o m Systems Analyst darkuncle@ [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t West Coast Network Ops GPG keyid 0xCB33CCA7 illum oportet crescere me autem minui