UUencoding, UUdecoding, etc.

[Jonathan B. Bayer]

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On Mon, 22 May 2000 13:24:53 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:

>    Places that offer, most for free, drive space on the internet so you don't
>need to worry about carrying floppies around to access files from different
>locations.  Most also allow public access to files through HTTP and
>instructions on how to direct people to those files.  Just picking one on a
>lark, X:drive, 100Mb of space, free, secure or share files.
>
>    Everyone who has access to the internet (which most people with access to
>email do) also has access to literally dozens of servers offering them space.
>It is a much better alternative than trying to /CRAM/ a file through an
>interface and technology that was never designed to handle it, that is
>obviously limited, and risk annoying the person on the other end when sending
>a link is virtually identical to them.

You and I (and most of the people on this list) are knowledgeable about
the internet and how to move large files around.  But the average
person is clueless.

Now, I am not advocating that they use e-mail to ship around large
files.  But I am recognizing that there are users who can't, are
unable, or just won't use web servers to transfer large file.

What I think there should be is YAS (Yet Another Standard), or maybe
just a very smart e-mail program coupled with some services somewhere
on the internet.  I would like to see a smart e-mailer which would
recognize that a file is beyond a certain size limit, and as part of
the mailing process transparently transfer the large file to a file
server somewhere on the internet.  It would then replace the attachment
in the message with a URL link to the file on the server.  The link
would expire after a certain period of time, when the file is deleted.

This would solve many problems, including the size problem.  For
example, a 1 meg binary file can easily expand to between 1.2 and 1.5
meg of MIME'd data.  So transferring it to a file server would reduce
the amount of traffic on the net.

This could be set up as a subscription service, with a certain charge
for the space that is used.  The e-mail client could be distributed for
free, with the users only paying when they send a file above a certain
size.

Hey, maybe I just came up with a good idea?????


JBB
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