On Mon, 13 Apr 2015, Wilfred van Velzen wrote to mark lewis:

 WvV>> Only if you're near the limit of a fidonet message. What is that 
 WvV>> now? 16KB?

 ml> nope... according to the spec, there has never been a limit on FTN 
 ml> message sizes... what there has been has been lazy programmers 
 ml> foisting artificial limits that they didn't want to work around...

 WvV> Than call it a practical limit...

in this day in age? it is definitely not a practical limit... it might have
been for DOS stuff but it is easily worked around by spooling the additional
data to a temporary file on the drive... that's what the code i use does when
compiled in a DOS environment... winwhatever and linux don't have the same
limitations... AFAIK, the limits are up past 2Gig now... maybe even past 4Gig
in most cases ;) 

 WvV>> But how usefull is it to post such big pieces of code? I can't 
 WvV>> remember ever have seen that happen in fidonet...

 ml> one of my posting tools used to post the entire ~2Meg nodelist to 
 ml> an echomail area for testing purposes... i used that same tool to 
 ml> post the most recent policy document proposal... users running 
 ml> antiquated software had problems but no one else did...

 WvV> The binkd faq used to be posted in 2 parts (the biggest was about 
 WvV> 30K) untill 2010. After someone complained, this was a problem, 
 WvV> it was split up in parts of at most 16K...

like i said... antiquated software and lazy programmers who couldn't or
wouldn't figure out how to page the excess to a temporary disk file ;) 

 WvV> So the practical limit is probably somewhere between these 
 WvV> numbers. 

i can't agree with that... especially not in today's world... certainly not
when i look at my DOS frontdoor mailer's editor or this TimED sysop
reader/editor and how they handle large messages stored in the JAM format...
indeed, the DOS fastecho has a limit that the native OS/2 flavor surpasses
greatly ;) 

)\/(ark