Re: Why no Attachments?

Hi:

Sorry for the late reply.

There are plenty of easy cheap or free ways of making images and documents
available without sending them as attachments through this mailing list.

If attachments were as small and as easily managed as plain text messages
I would not have problem with them. But they are not. They introduce
many problems that have no easy solutions. I think it opens a big
Pandora's Box.

The easiest solution to all these problems is for whomever wishes to
provide and image or document to take the initiative to put it online.
There are plenty of free/cheap ways of putting things online. Many ISP's
now provide free webpages to their clients. If the file is not worth the
effort to put online, then how can one justify sending it through the list
as an attachment?

If people really want I can provide a long list of technical reasons why I
don't want attachments going through the list. But I'll repeat "If a file
isn't worth the trouble it takes to put online, its certainly not worth
sending as an attachment to the entire list."

Filtering - the list uses a very specific header line:

        Reply-To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca

Every email program should be able to filter using this. Putting a
specific tag in the subject line clutters up the index listing and becomes
very redundant for people who already filter this list, and is redundant
in the archive.

Gord Holtslander
List Manager

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, John Cremati wrote:

> It seems to me that a Photography list with out the ability to attach
> documents, photos ect is highly ineffective... Even with a dial up modem a
> small image file does not take long to load..Any one with Windows 98 or
> later has this capability... The few that do not want to download images or
> attachments is there any means by which they can automatically block the
> transmission...Why exactly do we not allow the attachments? If it is for
> just a few "lost souls" with dinosaur computers? For a very small amount of
> money they now are able to upgrade or purchase a new machine... Maybe it is
> time to reevaluate this?
> John Cremati
>
>

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Gordon J. Holtslander Dept. of Biology
holtsg@duke.usask.ca 112 Science Place
http://duke.usask.ca/~holtsg University of Saskatchewan
Tel (306) 966-4433 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Fax (306) 966-4461 Canada S7N 5E2
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Received on Mon Jul 26 09:42:11 2004