Dear Qalam members,

A member wrote me privately to say this:

> I dropped out yesterday when the email attachment appeared.
> Most lists
> no longer allow this because of the danger of a virus contaminating
> the entire list. I believe Yahoo is thinking of discontinuing the
> feature altogether. I reconfigured my virus checker and
> re-upped. As a
> fellow moderator I would humbly suggest you turn this off and
> encourage members to upload to the Files section.

Attachments are allowed on this list because we need the ability of
showing pictures to each other. It would often be troublesome or
impossible to discuss some aspects of writing systems without being
able to show samples.

However, as our fellow member notes above, there is a theoretical
possibility that this feature is used to send viruses or other
unwanted material (porn, spam, etc.) in our mailboxes.

Yahoo!Groups recently added a "Photos" section to each group, which
could be a valid alternative to attaching pictures to e-mails. The
Photo section has already been used successfully by a member who
wanted to sell some of his books about typography: see
<http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/lst>.

Using the Photos section could have some advantages:

- Only pictures can be uploaded there, not macros, programs, etc.

- The pictures are not automatically sent to your computer, so if you
are on a slow connection, you don't risk to receive unwanted
kilobytes.

- In the case of unwanted content (porn, etc.), as soon as I find out
I can easily intervene and delete the pictures.

For the above reasons, I decided ask everybody's opinion as to
whether attachment should be forbidden on Qalam. You will soon
receive a POLL message; if you want to vote, follow the instructions
in the automated message.

Regards.
Seshat (Qalam admin)