Dear Listers,
Over the years, I have resisted the urge to enable enclosure support on the
Matronics
Lists for a number of reasons relating to performance, capacity, capability,
and security. However, its now 2006 and most everyone using email these
days is on an email client that, at some level, supports the viewing and
handling
of enclosures. I get a fair amount of email each month from people on the
various Lists asking why their posts of this or that picture didn't go through.
Back quite a while ago by popular request, I enabled enclosure support for a few
Lists such as the RV10-List, Kolb-List, and the Tailwind-List. Contrary to
my fears, there really hasn't been any significant issues on these Lists
relating
to the advent of enclosure support and for the most part, members have policed
themselves well with respect to the size of things they have posted.
Having enclosures enabled on some Lists and not others has given me a fair
amount
of headaches with respect to filtering messages and content since the formats
are often quite different between a typical MIME encoded message and a generic
plain-text message. The spammers are getting more cleaver all the time and
are constantly trying to thwart my best efforts at keeping them from posting
to the Lists.
So, for these reasons, I've have decided to go ahead and enable limited
enclosure
posting on all of the email Lists at Matronics. This will not only increase
the utility of the Lists, but will afford me a better opportunity to filter
out the chaff.
Here are some of the features and limits of enclosures on the Matronics Lists:
1) Enclosures will only be posted to the Real Time version of the
Lists.
2) Enclosures will NOT be included in the Daily Digest version of
the Lists.
3) Enclosures WILL BE forwarded on to the BBS Forum Web site.
4) Enclosures will NOT be appended to the Archives.
5) Enclosures will NOT be available in the List Browse feature.
6) Only the following file types and extensions will be allowed:
jpg, bmp, gif, txt, xls, pdf, and doc
All other enclosures types will be rejected and email returned to
sender. The enclosure types listed above are relatively safe from
a virus standpoint and don't pose a particularly large security risk.
7) !! All incoming enclosures will be scanned for viruses prior to posting
to the List. This is done in real time and will not slow down
the process of posting the message !!
Here are some rules for posting enclosures. Failure to abide by these rules
could
result in the removal of a subscriber's email address from the Lists.
1) Pay attention to what you are posting!! Make sure that the files
you are enclosing aren't HUGE (greater that 1MB). Remember that there
are still people checking they're email via dial up modem. If you post
30MB worth of pictures, you are placing an unnecessary burden on these
folks and the rest of us, for that matter.
2) SCALE YOUR PICTURES DOWN!!! I don't want to see huge 3000 x 2000
pictures getting posted that are 3 or 4MB each. This is just
unacceptable. Use a program such as Photoshop to scale the picture
down to something on the order of 800 x 600 and try to keep the
file size to less-than 200KB, preferably much less.
Microsoft has a really awesome utility available for free that allows
you to Right-Click on a picture in Explorer and automatically
scale it down and resave it. This is a great utility - get it, use it!
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
Look for the link "Image Resizer"
3) !! This would seem to go without saying, but I'll say it anyway. Do not
post anything that would be considered offensive by your grandmother.
And you know what I'm saying; I don't want to see anything even
questionable. !!
4) REMEMBER THIS: If you post a 1MB enclosure to a List with 1000 members
subscribed, your 1MB enclosure must be resent 1000 times amounting
to 1MB X 1000 = 1 Gigabyte of network traffic!! BE CAREFUL and BE
COURTEOUS!
I hope everyone will enjoy the added functionality of enclosures. Please police
yourself and use good judgement when posting messages with enclosures using
the guidelines I've outlined above.
Best regards,
Matt Dralle
Matronics Email List Administrator
|