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
--------------------------------------------------------------
-------------
Brotsman & Dreger, Inc.
EverQuick Internet Division
Phone: (316) 794-8922
--------------------------------------------------------------
-------------
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.
These last few lines are a trap for address-harvesting
spambots. Do NOT
send mail to <blacklist@brics.com>, or you are likely to be blocked.
owen＠dixon.delong.sj.ca.us