No degree of smartness will bring in a massive mail file over a slow link.
My fast modem failed recently, and I had temporarily restored the 2400b
internal modem that came with my Powerbook, while looking for a 28.8k
internal for it (no one seems to have one for 170/180 powerbooks). I
usually take along a 28.8kb external modem if I'm expecting to download any
significant files. However on this occasion only the old modem was in
place, which is still fine for regular email traffic. While this may be an
extreme case, lots of people are still using 9.6k modems. If you happen to
download email on a flight as I sometimes do (because I need to find out
where I'm supposed to be, or need to send out something urgent that I could
only finish on the plane), the data rate is restricted to 9.6K, and airtime
is expensive. So there are good reasons for people to want not to have
random giant objects interspersed with their email.
You can of course refuse to receive the large mail item. Eudora allows a
setting that says "please dont transfer any item over X Kb". However I
would then not even discover that I maybe urgently needed that particular
large file.
If you know of a better email handler for Mac's than Eudora, I'd be
interested in knowing about it. In my view its a great and reliable mail
program, much better than most workstation mailers, and has only one
defficiency - it represents large email items as lots of small ones. On
the other hand, one would normally send a large file like this as an
attachment, not imbedded text, and Eudora handles attachments beautifully,
whether they are postscript or videos, and no matter what size. What it
cannot do is speed them up.
I'm still convinced that mailing round massive postscript files is not the
way to go today. The Web makes it far easier to achieve the same effect
without drowning the net (many people on the list may not want to read a
particular document) in pbytes (postscript bytes, which are pretty
inefficient). Also with a Web pointer, you can access the latest version of
something if desirable, not the static version that existed at the time of
mailing.
Oliver McBryan; mcbryan@cs.colorado.edu
Phone: 303-6650544 and 303-4923898; Cell: 303-8097804; Fax: 303-4922844
Dept of Computer Science, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0430.
WWW: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mcbryan/Home.html