Re: Email messages: How large is too large?

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Mon, 13 Dec 1999 17:44:39 MST, Vernon Schryver <vjs at calcite.rhyolite.com>  said:
> Didn't I see mention of something called an "external body"?  That notion
> avoids the scaling problems of requiring that all spool directories and
> all destination mail directories be large enough when many people decide
> to forward a 28 MByte Good Times virus.

message/external-body dates all the way back to 1992, in RFC 1341 (the MIME
Dark Ages).  At the time, it seemed like a very good way to address the problem
in classic computer science style - instead of passing the data structure,
pass a pointer to it.

Unfortunately, for most of the Internet users of today, the availability
of long-term stable externally-reachable storage is low enough that you
usually end up dereferencing a null pointer.....
-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

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