I would like to second Igor's suggestion of the creation of a temporary or
permanent storage area where participants in the maillist could upload and
download attachments. While the recent suggestions of including text only
attachments within the body of the message sent is an excellent one, there
are some types of information (images, excel files, formatted documents,
etc.) which are not well-transmitted in message body text, and thus
attachments remain an important source of information.
Our current alternatives are:
1). To include the attachments in the general message to the group, which in
the past has raised questions of the time it takes to download such things
for those with slower connections, and more recently has raised questions of
potential virus propagation. Advantage is that everyone who might be
interested in the attachment information gets to see it.
2). To send the attachment only to the person who sent the original
question, and send notification to the rest of the group that such an
attachment is available, as Igor has done. Advantages and disadvantages are
basically the converse of number (1), with the added disadvantage that the
person so kindly offering the information in the attachment may have to then
send dozens of individual emails containing the attachment to all the rest
of us in the group who are also interested in the information.
3). To send the attachment and reply only to the person who sent the
original question, with no notification or information sent to the group.
This to my mind destroys the power of the group, as has been discussed in
the recent past, but has the "advantage" for the sender that they don't get
deluged with requests for the attachment, nor criticized for sending "too
much" information when only some people are interested.
It seems to me that creation of a central "attachment repository" as an
addition to the ABRF archives would be a wonderful and painless way to get
rid of all the disadvantages above, and provide access to more information
for all interested parties without burdening those who initially assemble
and offer to provide such information. It should be technically feasible to
have all the deposited attachments pre-checked for viruses as well, thus
eliminating the potential virus problem, at least for any known viruses. I
would imagine that some sort of CGI/Perl filter script could be created at
abrf@aecom.yu.edu that would automatically strip off any attachments,
eliminate the "V-card" type auto-attachments, and deposit the "real"
attachments into such a repository area. (The technical feasibility of all
of this is obviously a question for those who actually maintain the archives
- comments?).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce A. Stanley, Ph.D.
Director, Scientific Programs
Section of Research Resources, Room C1734
Penn State College of Medicine H093
500 University Drive
Hershey, PA 17033-2390
Voice (717) 531-5329 --- Lab and FAX (717) 531-4055
bstanley@psu.edu,
http://www.hmc.psu.edu/core/stanley/
on 5/10/00 9:12, I.L. Rodionov at rodionov@fibkh.serpukhov.su wrote:
> REM Attachment was sent to Winnell H. Newman ONLY.
>
> With reference to the new and, definitely, not the last wave of E-mail
> viruses/virusophobia, I propose again to allocate a temporary directory
> at the ABRF server available for uploading/downloading in FTP mode. As
> additional precaution, access may be restricted via password or using IP
> addresses to list recipients. This will eliminate all known and possible
> problems associated with file attachments FOREVER.
>
> Igor' Rodionov
<remainder of message removed>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 18 2000 - 09:47:35 EDT