Heretic! Everyone knows Gnus is the only email client anyone needs, as it runs in Emacs, the only text editor, user interface, operating system, and religion anyone could ever need.
I would kill to be your IT guy…
ew… uh, why? Do you desire to wield my company’s Very Large Rectal Corkscrew? Or is it because I don’t load unauth’d software?
I know someone who scans newspaper articles and sends the .pdfs when he could just link to the article (using megabytes when 30bytes will do)
Annoys me (and I’ve told him).
Brian
Principley the latter, but like Nanki-Poo, I have a Little List.
I damn near lost my virtual voice trying to lecture the nimrods who kept sending me ginormous, unnecessary files that would clog up my 10-MB-limit mailbox and cause my host to reject further incoming e-mail, including e-mail from clients and potential clients. :mad: I’d send them links to netiquette sites, explain how to reduce attachment size or avoid attachments altogether, tell them I use this address for my business, ask them not to send me any forwarded crap, etc.
“Oh, gee, well you’re the only one who complains. I send this stuff to other people all the time!”
Yeah, well maybe they don’t potentially lose business because you had to send a 12-MB animation of a dog licking the screen that I’ve seen a thousand times before. Maybe they don’t understand/recognize what happens when their mailbox is full. (Highly likely, that.) Maybe they’re all on corporate/organization e-mail accounts and aren’t personally responsible for managing their mail.
I hunted all over my host’s documentation trying to find out how to increase that 10-MB limit – not that I wanted to; I exchange large files with clients all the time, via FTP they way God intended. But I just needed the extra room for the dimwits. Couldn’t figure it out.
Finally I found an obscure notation: “Set to 0 for unlimited mailbox quota.” A bit counterintuitive, but I’ve been clog-free ever since. Ahhhh . . .
I didn’t tell the nimrods, though. I still want them to learn not to send giant unwanted files all over hell. Probably a pipe dream. :dubious:
Duplicate.
I’ve gotten 10 Mb files. I use preview, so it takes a while for the view to load before I can delete the thing.
And yeesh, Scarlett. We have a 100 Mb limit. I can’t imagine working with only 10 megabytes.
What’s your objection to using FTP? I handle files in the tens of MB regularly also, but they’re exchanged via FTP, either mine or theirs.
Everything I’ve read says that e-mail just isn’t designed for large file transfer. Unfortunately I’m not tech-savvy enough to understand or suss out why that is, but as long as there are other methods, it seems to make sense to use them.
One major problem with sending large files over e-mail is that the user has no control over when they come in, and it can be damned annoying to have to sit and wait for a large file when you don’t know what it is or even if you want it, or, as I’ve described, to have it fill up your inbox when you’re not even at the computer and you lose other mail. I’d much rather have someone send me a link or an FTP address and go get the thing when I’m good and ready.
Maybe they think (if they think at all), “Oh, it’s just this one time.” Until 3 people send huge files all at once, and together they add up to enough to clog the pipe. BZZT! I lose again.
I guess one thing I didn’t mention is that I wouldn’t mind it as much if I had advance notice, so I knew it was coming in and could grab it right away and clear the chute. But nobody does that either. They just send it with no warning. Suppose I just logged off and went on vacation? (Unlikely, because I’m obsessive about checking e-mail when I’m away, but that’s just me.) On several of my mailing lists, people will say, “I’ve got a funny picture/video/whatever that I’ll send to those who request it.” If we’re lucky they might state the size. But at least I have the choice of letting it come in, and maybe asking that it be sent tomorrow morning, when I’ll be at the computer.
To me, using e-mail for huge files is like doing this and FTP is like using one of these.
Suggested response:
"Dear Nimrodette,
I’m surprised to hear that I am the only friend you have who is disturbed by the enormous attachments you regularly forward to me and presumably others. Perhaps I’m the only friend who regularly loses business when clients’ mails are rejected by my e-mail ISP due to your forwards.
Speaking of which, a client I was counting on for $XXX cancelled his account owing to being unable to forward his material to me in a timely manner. May I ask when you will be able to send me the amount I lost owing to your insensitivity?
Regards*,
Scarlett"
- Well, it works for Shodan, right?
FTP is fine, we regularly send large files that way. However, I’ve gotten emails with ATTACHMENTS that are 10 MB and it slows me way down. And usually, I don’t need the info…I’m just on someone’s distribution list.
Hm, tempting . . . (un)fortunately I don’t think I’ve ever actually lost business over it. (I suppose they don’t have to know that, though . . .)
Yes, I do normally resize pictures, oh judgmental one. The point is, when I don’t have time (or I’m stuck on a machine that doesn’t have photo processing software), I have sent big files and they go through just fine. So my point (which you missed) is that Outlook doesn’t seem to have any trouble at all with large files.
I wonder if I can use Emacs terminal mode to run Pine.
1994 called, it wants its rant back. You people need to forward your personal mail to Google Mail or something. I think my Gmail account has a 25-gig limit these days?
I mean, if your Outlook chokes on 3MB and your mailbox limit is under a gig in this day and age, you need to apply something heavy and painful to your system administrator.
—Z, system administrator.
sigh I wish I could teach people how to NOT resize pictures. I do layout for a monthly newspaper, and it seems like every picture I get (even from people who should know better) is tiny. Even professional photographers sometimes don’t understand why I can’t print their picture at 5 inches square in the paper when their file is only 250 by 250 pixels.
Absolutely agreed! There’s no reason a business email system should be unable to handle a 3MB file. Personal, sure. But I get PowerPoint files, image files, audio files, and all kinds of other data bigger than 3MB.
Unfortunately, it seems like InDesign has a case of MicrosoftBloatItis. I recently made a bunch of layout changes in the newspaper. I wanted to make a template with the color swatches (perhaps 40 of them) text styles (30 or so) and object styles (about a half dozen). I took a short issue (32 pages) and cleared out everything except the masthead on the front page, a couple of column headers, and the page number/publication name on the master pages.
When I saved it, the file was over 30 megabytes.
I’ve had the same thing happen with Microsoft Word for many years. I started a new book by erasing the contents of an old one and starting from scratch (thus copying all of the page layout and style info), and ended up with a 1-page document 5 megabytes long.
Or take a job at a smaller company. Around here, the limit for normal personal mailboxes is 50 MB. With well over 250,000 employees, I don’t think we could afford to buy a quarter petabyte worth of disk arrays just to give everyone a gig for mailbox space. Eh, make it a half petabyte so there’s room for the next merger’s worth of new employees.
Most of the plebes (including me) at my Corporate Overlord have Outlook Inbox limits of 10MB, though execs and higher can request more. I think IT set it up this way on purpose to discourage file transfer via email, and encourage it via FTP or one of our “online collaborative project solutions” like we’re supposed to use.
However, sometimes I work with freelancers who don’t have access to anything but email, so I set up an auto-rule to shunt all 1MB+ incoming files to a folder in my unlimited local memory. Tools > Rules and Alerts… > EMail Rules > New Rule… > Rules Wizard > Start from a blank rule > Check messages when they arrive (Next) > Select Condition(s) > With a size in a specific range (fill in size range; Next) > Select Action > move it to the specified folder (choose a local folder; Next; Finish). Tada!
This used to happen to me using Acrobat markup. The solution in that case was: Save As, without changing the name, to force complete file replacement. New saved file has none of the history saved and is much smaller. Maybe it’ll work with another Adobe product.
Eh, you gotta figure the effective cap and the actual cap are two VERY different things–you have outlier users and typical ones.
Like me.
“You are currently using 151 MB (0%) of your 25600 MB.”
And that’s 95% text e-mails.
Part of my quota problem/issue is that we have a seriously psychopathic records retention policy–so we have to have five years of e-mails minimum.
Megacompanies have entirely different sets of problems, obviously, but I’d think you’d have to have a minimum of a gig or two for each user anyway–you figure each of them has anywhere from two dozen to a few hundred locally on their workstation, and no one balks at THAT, after all.
Storage is cheaper all the time, fortunately–never worked at a BIG company, but I have worked for a less-than-100-person company that nonetheless needed over a hundred terabytes for day-to-day operations. (meteorology research and precision forecasting)
Heh. What’s really depressing is when people at a high tech company do this. After a spate of these at my current company, our CEO, on his on-line radio show, said that people who reply to all might be next in line to be laid off. And, after a few rounds of layoffs, it doesn’t happen any more.
Though I think some filters got built into the mailer to fix it. We use Thunderbird, partially because the IT guys can add their own features.