On Thu, 7 Jan 1993 11:01:54 -0500 Dan Wheeler <WHEELER@UCBEH> said:
 
>Isn't there  an official policy  on limiting the  size of files  sent by
>Bitnet? I  think I  remember reading  very recently  that the  limit was
>being changed from  100K to 300K--and that sites did  not have to change
>immediately to 300K if it caused problems.
 
Oh, please. The US  part of BITNET has had a 300k file  size limit due to
its proverbial inertia  and the fear of certain officials  to do anything
which might potentially  stand a chance of introducing a  risk of pissing
off a nonzero amount of  decent, law-abiding, dues-paying members, not to
mention people whose vocabulary simply  doesn't include the word "no". So
the situation was that 300k was the  limit just like in 1982, so that the
handful of sites  genuinely concerned about this wouldn't  get angry, but
then nobody would object if you sent larger files, so the large amount of
sites  which want  to actually  use  the network's  binary file  transfer
facility for  what it's meant to  transfer would not complain.  The limit
has been raised to the still ridiculously low 1M with an option for 3M in
july (note that one  of the data files required for  the operation of the
network, and without which we would  not have a network to enforce limits
on, is 3M and is being sent over the network as a matter of routine).
 
>But I'd  be more comfortable  if I  could guarantee my  subscribers that
>they won't get email digests over a 1000 lines long.
 
You'll be able to  guarantee that, and lots of good it  will do them. You
still won't be able to guarantee  that nobody posts a message longer than
1000 lines  to the  list. You  won't be able  to guarantee  that LISTSERV
commands never generate evil  longer-than-1000 responses, nor that nobody
will ever  dare to store  a data file longer  than 1000 lines  which they
won't be able to order.
 
  Eric