[geeks] E-Mail file xfers (nee Gmail's attraction)

[Nathaniel Grady]

As much as I hate to fan the flames in what seems to be rapidly turning 
  into a flame-fest, I've actually seen what I though was a nifty 
solution to the problem of e-mail as a file transfer protocol. At Rice 
university the IT folks set up a web page where you can log-in using 
your e-mail account, fill out a form with a list of e-mail addresses to 
send to, select a file to upload, and input a message. Hit submit and it 
virus scans the file, puts it on an website, and e-mails the (https, 
though I doubt ssl is really necessary here) url to access the file to 
the specified list of people. I think it's about as secure as sending an 
attachment as only people receiving the email will have the url (which 
uses a rather long random hex string for the file id). Seems like a good 
solution to me as (a) doesn't require much clue on the part of the user, 
(b) everything going out is virus-checked, (c) trivial audit trail (send 
a url with a unique ID to each recipient for extra fun), (d) don't have 
to train users about how to properly set up a share with correct 
permissions (you know people are going to be lazy and keep setting up 
everyone has access shares no matter how many times you yell at them for 
it), (e) works for sending files to people outside the company/school 
(you could probably add a check box for allowing/disallowing access from 
outside the company LAN)... Of course, after implementing this, the IT 
dept didn't bother actually telling anyone it existed - I stumbled 
across it by accident! If I hadn't logged into the (also very spiffy) 
e-mail webtools system to change my filtering rules, I never would have 
seen it...

A similar possibility would be a WebDAV based solution, however I've 
never actually used WebDAV myself.

--Nathaniel Grady