[Techtalk] Attachment stripping and storing for Mailman

[Mary Gardiner]

On Sat, Dec 30, 2006, Fred H Olson wrote:
> I have the same problem but have not given up on 'Re-training in the
> "put it on the web and send a link"' . If there were a good strip and
> store facility, it seems like it would get overused. There are times when
> a non-text format is needed - a speadsheet or a flyer PDF or an image, but
> so often folks want to attach a Word or PDF file with just a bit of text
> that could easily be copied and pasted into the body of a message.
> I'd hate to faciliate that latter in order to accommodate the relatively
> infrequent instances of the former.

This is a particular case. The mailing lists are for family members,
which means they almost always want to exchange photos rather than say,
Word documents with a bit of text. It also happens to mean that many of
them have limited desktop skills: they know email, they know typing,
they know how to get pictures off their camera. Training them in the
"sign up for webspace, upload pictures to webspace, work out what URL of
picture is once uploaded, send URL" sequence is not trivial, even with
specialist photo services like Flickr. It's also not easy to explain to
them why someone might want to go through the "click on mysterious code,
second program opens up to show picture" process rather than the "open
email... there's my picture!" process.[1]

The concept of a URL is actually quite sophisticated: you upload
pictures to a certain place using some process, and then they
mysteriously show up with a string of characters that bears some
resemblance, but not a predictable one (especially not with things like
Flickr), to the upload process.

I'd really like to go through the minimum amount of user training
necessary for this.

-Mary

[1] Mostly, the ones on broadband have forgotten what dialup is like,
and also none of them realise that photos that come of digital cameras
can, let alone should, be resized.