Post in Better Notification of File Upload in Email Messages

Better Notification of File Upload in Email Messages From: Richard Waid Date: Apr 29 20:20 UTC Short link

On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 08:29 -0500, Steven Clift wrote:
<snip HTML attachment>

If you mean format the whole message as an HTML message then ... no I
hadn't considered it. I think actually that would be really confusing,
as messages with files would come as HTML (and defeat the purpose of
eliminating HTML postings), and other messages would not.

If you mean making the attachments HTML, then ... that might possibly
work, and it's worth a try.

> (Then as once proposed by Richard, allow open downloading of private
>  files for X days w/o a password.))

Actually, this is more than a proposal. This is implemented. Any group
can have this (and has able to have it switched on for months now).

> Note: This online group supports file sharing. Please name your file
>  with meaning before attaching to an e-mail sent to the group or before
>  uploading the file via the group website. Because files are on the
>  server and not directly e-mailed, you may share large files up to
>  XYMB. You may browse past files by topic via the online group or
>  access them by search.

I think that might be a little excessive for every email -- the problem
actually isn't the message. The problem is that the 'standard' (as we
all well know) these days is for people not to snip any of the previous
message/s at all, and to bottom quote the whole shebang. Which means
that you'll get that paragraph, plus all the attachment notifications,
in every reply.

> (Perhaps you want some sort of lesson in how to use the file sharing
>  repeated again and again, since we are teaching people new behaviour
>  and thus far folks aren't taking much advantage of this feature.)

I agree. I actually don't think we educate users about the file sharing
feature *at all* at the moment.

Use actually varies from group to group. The onlinegroups.net hosted
sites have over 20,000 files. e-democracy has about 2,000. I know the
groups I'm in use it quite heavily. I'm in groups which have the exact
problem being discussed -- people will send email with attachments,
then send it *again* to everyone as a cc because they can't find the
attachments they sent. I don't bother educating them, because I *know*
that the current system isn't working as well as it could.

I think once people appreciate that:

  1: They can send bigger attachments, because people don't have to
download them with the email (a problem even with broadband if you have
my mail volume);
  2: It enables more mobile email, because the messages are smaller, and
people aren't forced to download the attachments (and yet are still able
to, even from mobile email clients);
  3: The files are *archived* and thus searchable, and retrievable from
pretty much *anywhere*.

then we will get more effective of the system.
    

--Richard