H Norwood said:
Thanks for that - it raises a number of issues
Firstly, I gather, then, that Outlook2003 will not re-combine
multipart
messages?
Secondly, I am well aware of the issues relating to large messages,
and
personally do not send any unless I have no option. However there are
a
significant number of mail users who routinely send whatever they like
through the mail systems, fully expecting no problems. Whereas I might
be
able to educate the users on site here, I really have no influence
over
senders external to us.
From a "Normal users" perspective it would seem a step backwards that
a new
version of Outlook appears to be missing a feature that was supported
in
previous versions.
I am not personally aware (i.e., I don't recall) that any version of
Outlook support recombing multi-part e-mails. Maybe some version
earlier than Outlook 2002 did have that functionality. If it was there
and removed, it is likely the reason was for security. Virally laden
e-mails would get sliced into multiple parts in an attempt to circumvent
signature detection by anti-virus software. In fact, my anti-spam
software will tag any multi-part e-mails as spam (and my rule that
detects the tagged spam message will delete it). No sender should need
to use multi-part e-mails to send their message. Using it a file
transport substitute because it can be done is not an excuse that it
should be used. I could use an economy space-saver spare tire a
permanent driving tire but it's not smart to do so. People use
screwdrivers as hammers all the time.
If these are unknown senders then what do you care about getting their
huge e-mails? It obviously isn't a normal or expected communication.
Multipart e-mails won't get by many spam filters not only because they
are multipart e-mails but also because the receiving mail server sees a
flood of e-mails within a short time originating from the same source.
E-mail has never had guaranteed delivery so losing one part out of
hundreds still leaves that e-mail useless which you have no control over
and which the sender simply made a bad choice on how to get that content
to you. E-mail also has no recovery for file transfer or guarantee of
accuracy of content. Yeah, the sender could digitally sign or encrypt
the message which will show if the contents have been altered but all
that happens is you get notified of the corruption and you lose that
part which then renders the rest of the parts worthless.
I'm not sure how multipart messages work in newsgroups because I'm not a
binary newsgroup visitor so how to recombine a bunch of parts for a
usenet post is nothing that I've cared to investigate. Multipart
e-mails, however, is a bad way of trying to transfer a file. Even if
you could communicate with the sender to have them remail the missing
part, how would the sender know which part of the file to include for
the missing part out of the hundreds of parts that were sent? Secondly,
the sender doesn't have a copy of the parts used in the transmission but
instead just the whole message, so they'll have to send it all over
again, and again if another part goes missing. No, you cannot control
how a sender transfers an e-mail to you, but neither is it your
responsibility to nullify their stupidity. If a customer sent you a
support request but put "sex, viagra, mortgage, money, $$$, girls,
erotic, meds" and other spam trigger words in the Subject and body of
their post, is it your fault that their e-mail gets eradicated by spam
filters for something that obviously had spam-like content? Are you
going to disable all of your anti-spam measures because of a few stupid
senders? If you had such stupid customers that were important to your
business, you would whitelist them to bypass your filtering. Are they
really potential or new customers if they are sending you spammy e-mails
or slicing them up into hundreds of parts (and why would they be sending
you these huge e-mails, anyway)?
If you senders are too stupid to NOT slice up their e-mails into
multiple parts because they cannot figure out where to upload their file
using their own resources and then just provide a link to it, and if
this occurs a lot for senders that you cannot whitelist, then provide an
FTP server with an upload area where your senders can put their huge
files and then e-mail telling you that they just uploaded their file.
Then it is up to you to manage access to the FTP server, is security,
its disk quota, automatic purging, and so on. Do you really want dumb
e-mailers sending you huge e-mails that consume all of your mailbox's
quota and renders it unresponsive to any further incoming messages
which then get rejected and your other senders are told your mailbox is
full?
Ho hum... I suppose we'll have to find a work-round that doesn't cause
too
many calls to the help desk.
That's why I mentioned OE. Outlook is geared to the business market
while OE is geared to the personal-us market. Tell your users that they
will need to use OE, if possible, for multi-part e-mails but then you
need to qualify why your users should ever receive or even accept
multipart e-mails. More appropriate might be to tell your employees to
inform the sender that your company does not accept multi-part e-mails
for huge e-mails because they represent a security risk, e-mail is not a
guaranteed file transfer mechanism, and [which is probably true] that
there are quotas on mailboxes that limit the size of inbound messages
and the size of your recipient's mailboxes. If you really had a need
for customers to be sending you huge files, tell them NOT to do it via
e-mail but instead setup an FTP server where they can login and upload
their files. This also works for your employees that need to send a
huge file to your customers, like a big software patch that needs
immediate implementation, where you provide a download area that the
recipient is told how to login to retrieve that file.
