Some of you may have noticed uncharacteristic silence from ADSM-L today.
The list was offline thanks to Tomas Lindkvist who posted an attachment
to his note which was extremely large.  This blew out the space in our
logs and caused LISTSERV to hold the list until the problem was fixed.

Pardon me while I vent, but this kind of thing really ticks me off.  For
those of you from the 'PC generation' who think bytes are cheap, here's
alittle basic lesson in e-mail. All data transmitted via the 'Net is translated
into 80 character records, then transmitted via the Internet to its
destination.  The receiver's client then has the job of retranslating
the data back into a readable note.  This includes attachments.
Therefore, the bmp file that takes up 3M on your PC becomes a 16,000
record note when it is sent as an attachment!

There are a LOT of problems with this:

1. These attachments take up a LOT of space in our logs.  Therefore, problems
   such as today's occur.  Most of the problems we have had searching the
   list's logs either via LISTSERV or the web are due to the size of these
   logs.  Unnecessary attachments only increase the amount of data that must
   be searched, slowing down the search and sometimes making it impossible
   to do.

2. Not everyone has unlimited mailbox space.  As computer professionals,
   you should understand this.  These large postings prevent others from
   receiving subsequent mail because their mailbox is full.

3. A number of mail gateways do not accept e-mail with more than 20
   attachments.  Therefore, people who receive this list via digest don't
   always receive them.  I have had numerous complaints about this.

This is not the first time that this has happened, and I only see the problem
getting worse.  Therefore, I have instituted a 1000 line limit on all postings
to ADSM-L.  If you add extra attachments to your note, they are likely
to be truncated and be worthless.  If you want to share data with others
on the list, then send it privately, or put it up on your own FTP server.
Don't inconvenience everyone else with it.

Sorry if this note is a bit 'bitchy'.  However, everyone on this list
is a computer professional and should have more common sense than this.

Finally, I want to let you all know that the list will be offline (as well
as the LISTSERV and web interfaces) on Monday, March 16.  We will be
taking a planned power outage in our building so that the electric company
can do some long needed work to stablize our power.  I'm not sure how long
the outage will be, probably all day.

Martha McConaghy - ADSM-L list owner