Administrivia - Message Size Limits

Greeting to all list members,

The Database Advisors, Inc. Board of Directors has recently approved
lowering the size limits of
messages on the list to 20k. This is an attempt to encourage the snipping of
emails during replies and to reduce the size of the archives in the future.
Our archives are getting quite large, hence the cost of storing them is
going up. 

It is unlikely that we will see many messages exceed 20k in size if they are
properly snipped. 

HOWEVER our list moderators will let messages of any size through as long as
the following criteria is met:

1. it has been properly snipped
2. it does not contain attachments
3. it was sent using plain text formatting
4. it contains valuable technical information

If any of these criteria is not met, the post will be rejected.

Please bear in mind that, although it would not be typical of our elite
corp. of moderators, it may take moderators up to 24 hours to get to your
post to allow it through.

We initially experimented with the 20k limit on the Off Topic OT list where
posts tend to be long, for the most part because of poor snipping. One other
major cause of messages being held due to exceeding the size limit was
messages being sent in html or rich text formats. (The size is determined
before the html formatting is stripped and presently there is nothing we can
do about this.) In the weeks since we reduced the size limit on the OT
(where messages are often long winded (to say the least :o)) the number of
messages rejected due to exceeding the size limits has dropped to near zero.
Because of this we do not foresee a problem with the technical lists but
please let us know if you are experiencing any problems because of this
limit.

We sincerely hope this does not cause any complications in your utilization
of this valuable asset.

Regards,
John Bartow, President
Database Advisors, Inc.
Email: mailto:president at databaseadvisors.com
Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com