On Sun, 9 Jan 2000, George Frajkor wrote:

>     ASCII text is the only cheap, small, efficient and totally
> compatible files exchange system we have now.  I have absolutely no
> way, whether using a PC., Commodore 64, or Mac, to make use of any
> funny attachments that some into our Unix system at my university.
>    The object of communication is to talk to everyone, not Microsoft
> fans.

Sending attachments is not something you or I can stop, whether we like it or
not. I can surely see the benefits of it in certain cases. Listserv now is not
in the use of just computer professionalists. When a secretary types a 50 page
Word document of a meeting summary of the board of directors, she won't do it
but in Word. What I want is to be able to distribute it to a large group of
people via listserv and not pay the penalty of the huge disk space associated
with so many copies in the system. One copy in the WWW interface will do, plus
a pointer to it.

In fact while we are at it, I was having an idea for another way of tackling
this, which needs an additional feature in listserv: if I had an option to send
a mail (with or without attachments) with a 'NOPOST' option, so that the mail
is not sent to subscribers but IS logged in the archives (as is now the
situation with a list that has no members, or all members set to NOPOST), I
could then send very large files and not worry about multiplication of the
message to hundreds or thousands users. I believe that adding such a feature
will help use listserv in more ways than we can now.


>    Correct.  Please do NOT (NOT -- EVER) send attachments to large
> lists.  It is my disk space that is at issue, not yours.  And for
> people who have to pay a lot for Internet Service, you are REALLY a
> problem.
>

So we agree! I am indeed not sending out attachments to large lists just
because of this (not sure about others though..) hence my idea how to
eat the cake and keep the eggs intact, just send one copy to the archive
and tell the users via a simple and short text message that a document awaits
them at http://host.myhost/archives/mylist.html
Wouldn't it be great to have such an option ?

Best,
Moshe



>
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