182047 - Upload attachment to server instead of sending with message

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Attachments, enhancement)

Description

[Jan Fabry]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021029 Phoenix/0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021029 Phoenix/0.4

Many email servers (and admins) don't like big attachments. A better way would
be to upload the attachment to a server, and reference to it in the e-mail.

Mozilla could make this easier for end-user. It needs some information first:
[threshold] = 1Mb
[ftpserver] = ftp.myserver.com
[ftppath] = www/mymails/
[httpserver] = www.myserver.com
[httppath] = mymails/

When you try to attach a mail larger than [threshold], Mozilla asks you if you
want to use the server instead of attaching it to the mail. If you select yes,
Mozilla uploads the file to the server. It then gives back the url where you can
find the file. This url can be used in the mail to reference to the attachment
(the file).

Optional feature: encrypting of the file, either by the public key of the
receiver, or by some other method (but I guess that requires you send the
passphrase along with the mail?)

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

And who is going to delete the attachment later ?

Besides, I dodn't think the problem is in uploading the message (you just shift
the load from the mailserver to the ftpserver), it's in downloading the message,
especially if it's sent to multiple recipients.

Similar (commercial) systems exist, but they're installed on the mailserver
itself. They'll take your message (w/ attachment), determine that they'll have
to help (based on size *and* number of recipients), save the attachment on
another server, and rewrite the message to use a link for that attachment. Most
will use a HTTP-server, not a FTP-server, because HTTP might be easier to cache,
and supports partial downloads. But FTP will work too (and probably better in
most cases). The software who was reponsible for moving the attachment out of
the mail-message, will also be reponsible for removing the copy on the server,
probably after a timeout, or when the last copy of the mail-message was deleted
from the recipients inboxes.

We use a similar system in my company. It was installed after the CEO decided to
send a 4MB presentation to several thousand people (luckily he didn't want all
130.000 :-) I'll try to find out what product it is. 

Comment 2

[Henrik Gemal]

I've never heard of any mailclient that does this and it seems really really
weird request

Comment 3

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Verified Won'tFix.