[ILUG] email as file transfer

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ole Tange (ole at tange.dk):

> In this time and age where more and more have unmetered broadband and some
> even have their computer download email in the background this will not be
> a problem at all. Mail from one employee in a company with their own mail
> server to an employee in another company with their own mail server the
> problem is also non-existant.

Casting my mind back to 1995, I ran IT at a firm in San Mateo that had a
remote branch office that batch-processed all e-mail to and from the
rest of the firm (and the Internet) -- over 14.4 kbps modem link between
the offices.  One of the marketing people at the remote office called me
to complain that his (and everyone else's) mail wasn't getting through,
and hadn't been since the previous day.  

I investigateed -- while the marketing guy screamed louder and louder.
The modems were up, handling what looked (from the LED patterns) to be a
marathon mail-transfer session.  I found a way to examine the logs and
the spooled-up mail, and the real story emerged.

The marketing guy -- the very same one who was loudly complaining about
supposedly broken infrastructure -- had e-mailed a 30MB PowerPoint
presentation to each and every employee in the firm worldwide.  The poor
modems were trying to push a roughly 5 gigabyte mail transfer across the
wire.  Fortunately, the delay in accomplishing that gave us time to
prevent the mail-store machine from falling over.

That afternoon, we put in scripts to catch and autoreject any mail
exceeding, if memory serves, 1 MB.