E-mail attachments sent to a certain (public) e-mail address are scanned for virusses and then published on a website. In an automated reply the (short) URL is given and its expiration date.

I really hate it when other people flood the mailboxes of my friends or subscribers to my mailinglist with 'funny' attachments or unsollicited MS Office output.

My sysop told me that upto 80% of the backup is used for e-mail. Which consists for the largest part of e-mail attachments. Often the same attachment sent to many recipients.

Every provider should provide this service for each account, a way to e-mail executables, pictures, sound, movies and animations to a public directory. Uploading is too difficult for most people. Sending an attachment to a certain e-mailaddress and then forwarding the URL from the automated reply is easy.

Update. I made it myself. When you e-mail something to attachments on reinder.rustema.nl you can see it within 10 minutes at http://reinder.rustema.nl:81 (it's an old Mac running Eudora with the attachments folder shared on the web)

Update Jan 1 2003. A solution in the mailclient would be easier to implement. I wrote a new idea about it 'Mailclient with FTP'
-- rrr, Dec 29 2002

Picture of a black cat http://reinder.rust...l:81/Cat_Squint.JPG
Uploaded by e-mail [rrr, Oct 04 2004]

Mailclient with FTP http://www.halfbake...client_20with_20FTP
It uploads 'attachments' and adds the URL in e-mail [rrr, Oct 04 2004]

Picture of a black cat http://reinder.rust...l_81/Cat_Squint.JPG
Uploaded by e-mail [rrr, Oct 21 2004]

pointless as you could just upload the file to the website easily. its even simpler than emailing an attachment. you still have to browse your filesystem for the file either way. on top of that, i think this is baked.
-- ironfroggy, Dec 30 2002


Rather than the sender having to take the separate step of mailing the attachment to the server, how about integrating this feature into the receiving mail server? Any incoming attachment over a certain size is automatically intercepted as the mail arrives, and the attachment itself is replaced with a link to the storage.

It could do MD5 checksums of each attachment and include them in an index. Then as attachments came in it could check for dupes, so it would handle things like someone forwarding a file, without having to have two copies in the web store.

One advantage of this is the web storage of the attachments would be exactly as accessible/reliable/secure as the mail server. One disadvantage is you wouldn't save quite as much space on files that are being sent to many people on many different web servers.

It would be a neat feature to add to a mail server targeted at businesses. The resulting web store of recently emailed documents would also be a good first-order approximation of what should be on that company's intranet site at any given time.
-- krelnik, Dec 30 2002


I know people who have done this for their own use (incoming attachments). I haven't seen it packaged commercially, but it can't be far away. It seems logical for an enterprise mail server to offer this feature; instead of receiving mail with attachments you receive mail with links to your attachments.

Do note that many large mail servers do coalesce duplicate attachments into "single instance storage".
-- egnor, Dec 30 2002


Sensible practical and workable. Croissant.
-- madradish, Dec 30 2002


Two factors make this less urgent:
- If your mailserver and client speak IMAP, they don't need to download attachments unless the user asks for them.
- Many modern mailservers support keeping only one copy of a message sent to multiple recipients.
-- jutta, May 31 2004


I just came here to post this idea. Damn you.
An addendum: Add the ability to post files to specific folders in the webdir via directive in the email message, "folder: shiny_things" puts the file into /webdir/shiny_things.
-- ericscottf, Feb 22 2008



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