> 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? Is this really a big enough problem to be worth solving? I can't recall a single instance where I received IETF list with a problematic attachment. OTOH, I routinely get IETF messages with useful attachements - typically a critical revision to a draft which for whatever reason can't be posted as an I-D - that I really need to be able see without having to bother with some indirection. There are also times when I have access to email but no web access. What am I supposed to do then? This also creates significant problems for list archiving. Right now I can easily capture the entire content of the list and preserve it for however long I want. Do this and that becomes significantly more difficult - I have to detect these indirections, fetch and stuff the attachments back in, because regardless of stated policy I cannot assume that web link will be valid for as long as I need it to be. I also worry about the ability of mailman to actually know what an attachment is versus a message constructed in multiple parts. And there's also the issue of what sort of indirection it uses. Past experience with "advanced" list manager features like this doesn't give me a whole lot of confidence in their MIME chops. I suppose I could live with this - but not actively support it - if the stripping was limited to abusively large attachments - say ones over 5Mb or thereabouts. But otherwise it's a TERRIBLE idea, and will simply result in everyone including the draft or whatever in the primary message text in order to avoid this nonsense, which results in a degradation of list quality for all concerned. Ned