[Email-SIG] Handling large emails: DiskMessage and DiskFeedParser

[Matthew Dixon Cowles]

> I'm beginning to think that we don't have enough time to adequately
> prototype and test this for Python 2.4.

I agree with the idea of waiting. When Barry first suggested the new
protocol, I thought I'd prototype something and see how it might work
in practice, partly because I was one of the first people to advocate
disk-based message storage as an option.

But I'm having some trouble thinking of a practical use case these
days. My original thought some time ago was someone running a
canonicalization or filtering proxy-like-thing on a smallish server.
But it seems that RAM sizes have gone up faster than email message
sizes, at least where I look. I leave my Postfix servers with their
default max message size of around 10 MB and I don't hear many
complaints. I can't think of a server that I've spec'd at all
recently with less than 1 GB of RAM.

In the case of an MUA, I'd say that if someone swamps their VM by
opening too many messages, it's their own problem.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that someone has a use case. But
without one that I can test my ideas against, I don't trust my own
intuition about what's a good idea and what's not.

Regards,
Matt