But for a little extra SMTP handshaking at the start, there is no efficiency difference in transfer rate between SMTP and FTP. Probably the same is true for HTTP though I've not looked.
I think you missed the fact that sending files via SMTP is incredibly inefficient. Any files sent via SMTP have to be encoded which can balloon the transmission up 30%+. That is an incredible waste of bandwidth on a After all, nmodep compress it back to the original size while transferring. The rate loss is 5 - 10%, not 30 - 40.
For LAN, this volumes are not large (1 - 2 Mb).
10MB file. Also, remember that SMTP usually relays, so the message is bounced between 1-8 servers along the way (or more), more bandwidth and resources wasted. *sigh*
-- Robert Blayzor IP Network Engineer, BOFH BiznessOnline.com, Inc. rblayzor@thebiz.net noc@thebiz.net http://www.thebiz.net/
FreeBSD, Putting the 'Operating' back into OS! -- http://www.freebsd.org/