I fight FUD almost every day. The reason FUD succeeds is because people who know better are too lazy to fight it. Sure, it seems easier at the time, but in the long run, it just makes all of our lives harder. If you give a mouse a cookie, it will come back for a glass of milk. Owen

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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Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:23:58 +0000 (GMT) From: A Trap <blacklist@brics.com> To: blacklist@brics.com Subject: Please ignore this portion of my mail signature.

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