Brandon Blackmoor wrote:
Most mailing lists do not permit attachments for three very good reasons:
a) It is a significant security risk (and don't you dare blame the victim -- you and I may be smart enough to protect ourselves adequately, but most people are not, and when *they* get infected with a worm, it is your server and mine that gets inundated with spam and DDOS atacks).
Ack!
c) It is an enormous waste of bandwidth to send the same file to every person in the mailing list. An *enormous* waste of bandwidth: far more than what is used when the same file is downloaded from a web server.
If you want to share a file, the proper thing to do is to put it online somewhere so that the people who *want* to see it can go see it *when* they want to see it, without forcing *every* mailing list subscriber to download it at the same time they are retrieving their email. That's just obnoxious, plain and simple. In addition, many of us are on dial-up connections, and some of us pay for every minute your attachment is downloading, even if we are receiving the list as a digest and can't see the attachment we have paid to download.
Ack!
Cheerz Lars