[Grovenet] Grovenet administration settings part 3

[Chris Genly]

There is a message size limit of 300KB.  That's pretty big.  Not big
enough for large pictures or a large number of pictures in one message,
and not large enough for movies.  The size has been increased a number
of times due to complaints.  Generally it's not considered polite to
send large mail messages.  If you send a funny email to the list with 20
large images, there may only be a fraction of the currently 137 members
that are interested in looking at the pictures.  But in any case, that
mail will be copied by the grovenet list server and sent out 137 times.
It's a huge waste of email bandwidth, which is already under pressure
because of spam abuse.  It is generally better to send a URL to the
material you want to share.  URLs are small, and those interested can
pull the content for viewing.   If someone has a dial-up link they will
be forced to wait for large messages to be downloaded regardless of
whether or not they are interested in the material.   And lastly it puts
a larger demand on the the servers archiving grovenet.  URLs are
sometimes long and get mangled by email programs.  Some people use
tinyurl.com to turn a big url in to a really short one that survives
email mangling.

That said, the message size limit is under control of the
administrators.  If the list can come to some consensus on a new limit
Bud or I would change it.  I don't know what consensus means.  Could we
come to a consensus on that? :-)   I'd want a lot more than the top five
posters to come to an agreement.  20 maybe?

Messages over size are not just discarded.  They are held for approval
or rejection by the administrators.  I rarely approve an oversize
message for the reasons stated above.  Bud may have a totally different
approach.  Also, messages held for approval are not attended to right
away.  Depending on my workload it might be the same day, but it might
be a week later.  But then again, Bud might attend to it before I do.