Why doesn't the GSRC Mailman system handle large attachments?

Gigascale Systems Research Center
FAQ
Mail list administration

Previous section	\|	This section	\|	Next section
Previous question	\|	This question	\|	Next question

Why doesn't the GSRC Mailman system handle large attachments?
Christopher Brooks, 8 Jun 2000
Last updated: 3 Mar 2002

Q: The mail handling package that manages email for the various GSRC workgroups is configured to bounce email messages that are larger than 40k. This makes it difficult to send attachments. Why?

A: There are several reasons that Mailman is configured this way:

Sending Attachments to large groups of people on a mailing list is not always appropriate. Very large attachments can bog down mail servers. If a 10mb attachment is sent to a mailing list that has 10 people on one server, then that message will require 100Mb. This could cause problems

Attachments are very insecure. The recent 'ILOVEYOU' attack is an example of how attachments can be misused

Email that contains attachments are not indexed by the website search engine, whereas some files (such as .pdf files) that are placed as web pages will be indexed.

Mailman does not handle large messages gracefully - the web interface tends to be very slow or crash.

However, many people use attachments for collaboration, and we intend to make it easier to use attachments with the website.

In the short term, the workaround is to place the file in the workgroup forum and ask people to go to the forum to upload the article. For more information, see How do add an article to a forum? and How do I attach or upload a file to an article?

One workaround would be to have an alias that is not indexed for large attachments, or to have a way to mark large messages as approved mark them as not-to-be indexed.

Another solution is to use CVS for collaboration and sharing of files.