Are our standards slipping? Are we setting ourselves up for calamity?

Have you noticed that few people bother to use Stuffit or WinZIP to archive attachments they send any more? Attachment size isn't the issue it used to be, but security and file integrity still are.

The world of dialup users has expanded as fast as the WWW in the past 5 years. DSL and cable broadband usage have likewise mushroomed. V56 modem dialup is a huge improvement over the first old 1200 and 2400 baud modems.

People will say, I have a 40GB HD now, why should I mess with compression schemes? Dialup may seem slow to broadband users, but almost everybody in a corporate environment enjoys shared T1 speeds. They use it for personal email, too. More users are also sophisticated enough to manually reduce image size before mailing.

Internet mail server protocols are more standardized. Mail clients like Outlook let us transparently exchange "complex" objects and documents. We can even embed the objects instream, rather than as attachments. Is this a blessing?

Standards have dropped in many ways. To scan attachments, we rely on anti-virus software, though we rarely update the virus definitions. Expectations on acceptable ways of sending executables have evaporated, and more and more people are again sending unarchived executable scripts and programs with no warnings and no protection.

When will the calamity hit? Archiving (compressing) attachments is still the best way to "deliver the mail". If the attachment is an image, complex document, or executable program, Stuffit or ZIP it. Compression "wraps" the attachment to help protect it during transmission. There are also special issues between users of different machine types. Too few people understand what protocol or courtesies to expect, or what is expected of them.

Unless you already have an understanding or arrangement with a specific correspondent, compression is still the expected standard. Maybe we should all get back to that before the next big virus hits.

copyright © June 9, 2001 by Alex Forbes