I run the email list for a couple of real life groups. Folks like some of you here. Non-techies on slow connections. One woman sent round (or tried to send round) a pdf, sized at 750kb, advertising an event. (She sent it on the day of the event, to the wrong address, but that's another story.) I think 750kb is a bit large, and it should be either reduced (can one reduce a pdf?) or she should put it up elsewhere and advertise the web address. She's come up with some good questions, based on her own experience.

When the original comes to me, at what size do I know when a file needs to be reduced? (On my system, this poster did not start to download until I asked it to do so. Then it asks if I want it saved or opened, so it does the trouble-shooting for me.) Could I not warn people not to download a .pdf if they're on dial-up? Can he/she not see the size of the item and take care? And why is a dial-up user stuck with downloading something? Can it not be suspended by using the esc key? Sometimes I receive digital photos which the sender has sent HUGE, too big to see clearly, even. Is that the same sort of prob?

Her questions have me thinking. Maybe everyone with slow connections (excluding my parents) now now systems that allow more control. Is that so? Also, what about the storage space it sucks up? 10MB sill sounds right to me for email accounts, which doesn't allow for too many files of this size. Your thoughts? Cricket

My email software would leave an undownloaded email with an attachment like that on the server, until it was downloaded. And the pop servers are rather slow compared to everything else I access. So if I had a big attachment lurking in there and it was being a pain to download, I'd be stuck with it until I went into its webmail front end and deleted it manually. I don't think 750k would be such a pain to me though as I have broadband, and although email downloads seem slow, they're an awful lot faster than dialup email downloads. For people recieving group email at work, it's becoming more common now for the size of their mail database to be restricted. Mine and my husband's are restricted to 50mb (separate companies), and since it's work email, that space is needed for work attachments not personal stuff. I have no idea whether many people would recieve their group email at work, expecially if there are restrictions in place, but it would depend on whether it's easy for them to access email at home, or whether they feel they have to get their group emails asap. Free email services? Yahoo claims to be unlimited in size, and hotmail gives you 2gb of storage. Since they're web based, they give you more choice over whether to download attachments or not as well. I find 750k annoyingly big for an attachment. Especially one that's useless. But I'd accept it for a digital photo, because they're big, unless it was photos I wasn't expecting and really didn't want. In which case I'd be stuck with going to the webmail interface on my email and deleting the thing from there, if the pop servers were funny about letting me download it. It's all context, isn't it? I do recall there used to be an option on yahoo groups to disallow attachments. Banning attachments would stop any arguments whatsoever about it in future.

http://www.gatchamania.net/thread.php?threadid=1071