On Fri, 25 May 2001 18:12:30 EDT, Steve Sobol said:
Perhaps there is no inherent difference in throughput, but the files are necessarily larger when sent through e-mail, as they must be base64 encoded.
There's no *inherent* reason they *must* be base64 encoded. Please note that all the way back in RFC1341, in addition to a CTE of 'base64', there's the '8bit' and 'binary' CTEs. Sendmail started having sane support of '8bit' way back in 8.7, in 1995. RFC3030 defines the BDAT extension for SMTP. Now, the major real-life reason why encoding is needed is because Sendmail 8.12 still doesn't have BDAT support. If there's sufficient real-world demand, it's probably implementable fairly easily (a quick readig of RFC3030 and the Sendmail 8.12 source doesn't pop out any astounding show-stoppers)... If there's a lot of demand for it, I'll see what it would take to get it onto the Sendmail 8.13 feature request list.... Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech