Re: Snail mailing a FAQ?

John Relph (relph@presto.ig.com)
Mon, 26 Sep 94 14:54:27 PDT

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In reply to: Lani Teshima-Miller: "Snail mailing a FAQ?"

>Hi all;
>
>I got a request from an AOLer to snail mail him a printed copy
>of my FAQ. He said my FAQ was too large for him to print
>himself. I told him my files were too large to print (it's now
>almost 300k altogether). Today, he asked me if I would be
>willing to put it on a disk if he sent me a disk and some
>stamps.

Why doesn't that user break the FAQ up into pieces and print the
pieces separately? And it's it's too large to send in one piece, send
him pieces (one per day if necessary) until the user can print each
piece and delete the pieces.

>I would like to ask all of you what your suggestions are. I do
>*NOT* want to make an exception and start doing something I'll
>regret. I don't want to have to help someone because their
>online service is dysfunctional. I am providing online information,
>and am not in the publishing business.

Agreed. You *could* also compress the file and uuencode it and send
the user the compressed/uuencoded file (which should be smaller than
the original). If they have uuencode/compress at their end.

>Also, does anyone know how someone from AOL could correctly
>download large FAQ files to their computers?

AOL isn't hooked in using FTP *yet*. Until then, the user has to do
every through e-mail and I think AOL has a 100K-byte limit on incoming
e-mail messages. Fools. Hence the suggestion you break the file up
into pieces. Of course, the FAQ Guidelines suggests you break a large
FAQ into pieces smaller than 64K-bytes, so if you do so you should be
able to e-mail the smaller pieces to the AOL user without a problem.

-- John

Next message: Andrew M. Langmead: "Snail mailing a FAQ?"
Previous message: tombaker@acs.bu.edu: "Re: Snail mailing a FAQ?"
In reply to: Lani Teshima-Miller: "Snail mailing a FAQ?"

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