[odf-discuss] Richard Stallman - We can put an end to Word Attachments

[Lars Noodén]

Russell Ossendryver wrote:
> Don't you just hate receiving Word documents in email messages?

Yes.  I used to have procmail set up to delete the entire message and
send a missive back to the offending account.

> ... Word
> attachments are annoying, but worse than that, they impede people from
> switching to free software...

Security:

Attachments are a (the?) major vector for Windows malware.


Infrastructure Cost:

Binaries take up a lot more space that means more bandwidth and higher
storage costs.  Straight up base 64 encoding increases the size of a
steam of raw data by 4/3 just by itself.  However, since you are not
encoding raw text that way, but a monstrously large binary file, the
final cost to bandwidth and storage goes up by several orders of
magnitude.

Thus avoiding binary attachments can reduce your traffic (and costs) by
25% - 99%


Labor:

Munged or missing fonts, incompatible versions (to drive sales) all mean
extra work for the recipient.

> ... Maybe we can stop this practice with a simple
> collective effort. All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word
> file to reconsider that way of doing things.
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

That's due for a re-write.  It'll be easier to pass around something fresh.

Regards,
-Lars