E-mail vs. FTP -- RTF RFC

Sat May 26 16:24:47 UTC 2001

One of my clients, a largish dot-com, tried this ... resounding lack of
success. The end-user community did NOT like it when an email arrived with
links. They were too afraid that the link might point to a virus, among
other things (yeah, I know, but YOU try fighting FUD for a while).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: E.B. Dreger [mailto:eddy+public+spam at noc.everquick.net]
> Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 7:57 AM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: E-mail vs. FTP -- ***RTF RFC***
> 
> 
> 
> Greetings all,
> 
> Section 7.3.3 of RFC1341 addresses the external storage, 
> expiry, et cetera
> issues.  Not perfect, but a good first pass... and almost ten 
> years old,
> too.
> 
> ((( Thanks to Valdis for pointing this out! )))
> 
> We could probably kludge FTP as an interim measure:
> 
> * MTA intercepts attachments, and spools them separately.
> 
> * "access-type: ftp" with, e.g., username "msg12345recipient67890" and
>   password "mi93et490" and "expiration: Mon, 28 May 2001 
> 00:00:00 +0000".
>   The specific parameters would be generated on a per-message basis.
> 
> * Mail admins can enforce quotas.  Nothing new.  The 
> arguments in favor of
>   electronic transfer are on the grounds of timely communication.  One
>   could argue that somebody not checking mail for a week 
> doesn't deserve
>   to receive their attachment without a second 
> "transmission".  The proxy
>   MTA could insert a human-readable expiration notice or 
> whatever other
>   user-friendly prompting is deemed to be a good idea.
> 
> * We could also forget the MIME method, and put in a 
> human-readable link
>   to get the attachment, a la electronic greeting cards.  
> This would allow
>   immediate use of non-registered access-type methods.
> 
> Eventually, I'd like to see this done via HTTP/1.1 using chunked
> transfers.  However, no current MUAs will support a non-existant HTTP
> method or any X-Experimental methods.  For something that would work
> *right now*, I think that RTF RFC and going from there is the 
> right way...
> 
> Does anybody know what MUAs follow the RFC for external 
> message content?
> A little smtpd and ftpd hacking could yield something workable PDQ.
> 
> 
> Eddy
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------
> 
> Brotsman & Dreger, Inc.
> EverQuick Internet Division
> 
> Phone: (316) 794-8922
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------
> 
> Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:23:58 +0000 (GMT)
> From: A Trap <blacklist at brics.com>
> To: blacklist at brics.com
> Subject: Please ignore this portion of my mail signature.
> 
> These last few lines are a trap for address-harvesting 
> spambots.  Do NOT
> send mail to <blacklist at brics.com>, or you are likely to be blocked.
> 
> 