Re: Email messages: How large is too large?

[Jon Crowcroft <J.Crowcroft at CS.UCL.AC.UK>]

In message <199912170504.AAA29009 at fnord.meitca.com>, Reto Lichtensteiger typed:

 >>I think that Tim Dierk's idea has merit and should get some attention.
 >>It's somewhat cumbrous, but than a lot of protocols coming out of IETF
 >>are <g>
 
Reto 

hmm - yes....thinks...
 
in the AVT and MMUSIC world we developed some tools to do session
initiation - some of them allow a user to register their existence,
and some allow one to advertise a session with performance parameters
(we're not talking about resource reservation, just advisory info) -
if a mailserver for a user was configured with this info, then you
could _dynamically_ select when to split large messages into things
cached on a server site + message with URL, and when to just send the
whole thing, based in some hinted at access line capacity  the
receiver had (and they don't have to be _always on_ for this to work)-

so when you register with a dialup ISP, maybe one could indicate disk
and modem rate, and preferences...

 cheers

   jon