On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 11:45 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan
<srik.lak@gmail.com> wrote:
This is not a primer, but one thing I changed today was increasing message size from 40 KB to 240 KB. Ideally mailing lists dont encourage attachments / huge mails, but sometimes like today Bala had to attach since he couldnt upload to commons.If any of you feel the limit of 240 KB is high / low, please comment. Also remember under current setting anything above 240 KB will not come instantly, patience appreciated :) I think its better to mail a list ettiqute every month annoucing list guidelines since there will be lot of newbies to mailing list (like it will prevent invitations to join blah blah etc). I will put a wiki page on this soon. This will also help people aware of general mailing list ettiqute (lets not call it policy :) )
Well, 240K could be huge - maybe we'll need to check with sysadmins of Wikimedia servers whether this is okay for size filter.
Larger the size of the email the more it would tie up the servers (as the server tries to deliver these large messages to everyone on the list).
Also, allowing larger sized emails would mean just a set of emails close to the limit can count up to MBs in size mailed each day to every single mailbox (Think of those who would be accessing these emails on mobile with limited data packages).
The size of the email is large when there's HTML formatting in it.
And with attachments - uploading files somewhere accessible on web might be a good idea as those use looking into the archive later may not find the attachments anyway (as the attachments don't get stored on the server).
+1 on mailing the etiquette.
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