Anyone who is new to the Freewaytalk universe may not know who I am. I’ve been a devoted Freeway user since 1997, an on-again-off-again Softpress contractor (Web system architect, designer, and developer 2003 - 2006) and your humble List Emperor since 2007 or so, when I built the Web interface to the FreewayTalk mailing lists with the help of Finlay Dobbie.
This is a mailing list, and messages you send to the list are amplified many many times! Each message you send gets delivered (separately, as a new message) into thousands of in-boxes around the world. Each of these in-boxes may have its own limitations (not everyone uses Gmail, for example) and so the size of these messages matters quite a lot.
When you send a file with an attachment, that attachment has to be duplicated within the body of each message sent by the Softpress server, which creates another separate storage and bandwidth issue. The server that runs the mailing list and the Web interface is leased by Softpress. This is why there is a strict 40K file size limit on each message sent to or from the list.
40K is a decent doctoral thesis in plain text, so don’t feel like you have to hold back. But you do have to restrain yourself from the impulse of including any attachments – even that lovely logo in your automatic Mail message footer. The server can strip HTML from your messages and convert to plain text, but it doesn’t presume what to do with an attachment. The Mailman software sends a message to all of the (volunteer) admins once a day until one of them logs into the back-end and deals with it.
If you need a picture (worth a thousand words, but probably larger than 40K) to explain a question or answer to the list, then simply upload it to a Web server somewhere, and include a link to it within the body of your message. If you want to get fancy, you can type in the Markdown format for an image link, and the Web view of the list will show your image inline:
[alt text](http://example.com/image.jpeg)
If you need to send an Exhibeo file to Softpress, then you have a couple of options. If it’s at or below 10MB total, use support(a)softpress.com, or if it is larger, use a file-sharing service like YouSendIt or KickSend or even my own Fling service (http://fling.walterdavisstudio.com) If you are visiting the list via the Web interface, then you will see a (f) badge image on the Softpress employees’ avatar images. (If you’re subscribed by mail, then the @softpress.com e-mail address will likely be a clue.) If anyone in that camp asks you for a file, implicit in that request is that you send it directly to them, not to the whole list!
Thanks very much for your understanding in this matter, and let’s get back to making excellent Web sites!
Walter
Exhibeo mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options
