Attachments eat up space in digests when they come through as
gobbledygook -- you know, wert1sj23gosy!!js#syuco3enslk -- pages of that
stuff - and some people have limited space, plus it's a damn nuisance.

But BIG attachments will BLOW UP the digest -- and sometimes blow up
people's mailboxes in the sense that one of them comes through, and then
nothing else can get into the mailbox because the mailbox is full.

For example, I've got the cutest "gif" of a snowman with snow falling on
it.  It's 50K.  It looks like a little teeny thing -- but to the
computer, it's HUGE.  So if, in all innocence, having learned how to
attach a "gif", I sent the thing -- I would make a real mess of people's
mailboxes.

People don't mean to cause trouble with these things -- they think
they're neat, and they try them.  You can always tell the first time
someone has learned they can colorize their messages on AOL (or
compuserve or one of them; can't remember which one does it) -- the
message comes out surrounded by gobbledygook.

Not much you can do about that except have a stock responsse to send to
remind everybody that html and other fancy languages don't come out on
everybody's servers, so please don't send it -- but you DO have to stop
the HUGE attachments people are capable of sending.  And the only way I
know how to do that is with line limits.

Mary Schweitzer, WECAN - the Worldwide Electronic CFIDS/M.E. Action
Network (CFIDS and M.E. are alternate names for chronic fatigue syndrom)
http://www.cfids-me.org/