Some suggestions have been made about the IETF mail lists. There is a way for mailman to strip attachments and put them in a place for downloading with a web browser. This would be a significant change to current practice, so the community needs to consider this potential policy change. What do you think? Russ >>>> The only bug in the soup is that it seemed to me that we might >>>> want to look into an alternative approach. We have asked people >>>> to post large documents somewhere and only send a pointer. Not >>>> everyone can do that, lots of people forget, and some people are >>>> just not willing to take the extra step. >>>> >>>> Plus, we cannot expect people to keep things posted on their own >>>> personal, or their company's, web-site indefinitely. If they >>>> don't keep it there, then the pointer in the archive will become >>>> stale, and information that should probably be there is lost. >>>> >>>> So we need a solution to the issue with really big email messages >>>> sometime. >>>> >>>> One solution might be to simpy strip attachments off, put them >>>> in the archive and replace them with a pointer. That shouldn't >>>> be that hard, since a lot of anti-virus software does something >>>> similar with suspect attachment types. >>>> >>>> Or we could - once again - ask people to post attachments and use >>>> a pointer in their mail, only provide them with a place to post >>>> them in the same general area as the mail archive. >>>> >>>> If there is already something like this in place, please let me >>>> know what it is and I will add a pointer to it in my "too big" >>>> rejection messages. >>>> >>>> The thing about threaded messages getting too big is a slightly >>>> different issue, brought about by the increasing use of HTML >>>> format email. I talked years ago about this with Scott Bradner >>>> because I really think that HTML format messages are useful and >>>> relatively easy to read when compared to plain old text. >>>> >>>> But using HTML leads to messages that are deceptively big. >>>> >>>> Possibly the right answer in that case is to bump the size limit >>>> up to maybe 100K. Even with HTML format, people will many likely >>>> realize that nobody is going to read past the 10th back message >>>> in any case (or if they do want to, they can look at the thread >>>> in the archive). >>>> >>>> But even that approach is not fool proof, and there are a lot of >>>> resourceful fools out there. >>>> >>>> Just trying to be creative, and help out...