One of my clients, a largish dot-com, tried this ... resounding lack of success. The end-user community did NOT like it when an email arrived with links. They were too afraid that the link might point to a virus, among other things (yeah, I know, but YOU try fighting FUD for a while).

-----Original Message----- From: E.B. Dreger [mailto:eddy+public+spam@noc.everquick.net] Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 7:57 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: E-mail vs. FTP -- ***RTF RFC***

Greetings all,

Section 7.3.3 of RFC1341 addresses the external storage, expiry, et cetera issues. Not perfect, but a good first pass... and almost ten years old, too.

((( Thanks to Valdis for pointing this out! )))

We could probably kludge FTP as an interim measure:

* MTA intercepts attachments, and spools them separately.

* "access-type: ftp" with, e.g., username "msg12345recipient67890" and password "mi93et490" and "expiration: Mon, 28 May 2001 00:00:00 +0000". The specific parameters would be generated on a per-message basis.

* Mail admins can enforce quotas. Nothing new. The arguments in favor of electronic transfer are on the grounds of timely communication. One could argue that somebody not checking mail for a week doesn't deserve to receive their attachment without a second "transmission". The proxy MTA could insert a human-readable expiration notice or whatever other user-friendly prompting is deemed to be a good idea.

* We could also forget the MIME method, and put in a human-readable link to get the attachment, a la electronic greeting cards. This would allow immediate use of non-registered access-type methods.

Eventually, I'd like to see this done via HTTP/1.1 using chunked transfers. However, no current MUAs will support a non-existant HTTP method or any X-Experimental methods. For something that would work *right now*, I think that RTF RFC and going from there is the right way...

Does anybody know what MUAs follow the RFC for external message content? A little smtpd and ftpd hacking could yield something workable PDQ.

Eddy

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Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. EverQuick Internet Division

Phone: (316) 794-8922

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