X-Message-Number: 29670
Date: 22 Jul 2007 07:01:35 -0000
From: "Kevin Q. Brown" <>
Subject: CryoNet message length

Messages 29650, 29655, 29660, and 29661 include brief discussion
of the 20K maximum length for a CryoNet message.  Yes, 20K _is_
miniscule for today's computers and Internet connections.
But the readers of the messages are not computers.

After nearly 19 years of operation, the heart of the system still
is the nightly plain-text digest.  Long messages make that digest
unwieldy for a person to read.  Although you can receive individual
CryoNet messages via WWW, RSS, SOAP, David Stodolsky's undigesting
service, or even specially-constructed emailed archive requests,
the system still must support the plain-text digest.

There is another reason to restrain the maximum length.
Over the past few years, most of the CryoNet enhancements have
addressed three classes of problems:
  (1) accidents, (2) spammers, and (3) abusers.
A limited message length is just one of the mechanisms employed
against cases (1) and (3), as a form of damage control when the
other mechanisms fail.

But why 20K?  Wouldn't 10K or 5K satisfy the above goals even better?
And why stop there?  Let's just truncate messages at

<<< MAXIMUM MESSAGE LENGTH EXCEEDED >>>

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