images, etc.
Insurance Policy(seen on May Day 2002 in London)
Every now and again, I get sent e-mails with MIME attachments. Folk with mailers which make this easy send such without realising just how huge the result is. Folk receiving these over a modem and a piece of BT's salty wet string can get quite upset at this. In any case, such images take up huge band-width, as well as creating many copies of them all over the internet, and it'd be nice to avoid both of these `features'. Fortunately, there's an easy solution.
The easy solution is to bung the images up on a website and circulate a link to it. Then your recipients don't take up bandwidth for the `attachment' without first deciding that they do want to see it; also, they don't end up with a huge mail sitting in their in-box, nor do they end up downloading an image huge numbers of times when it turns out that all their friends forwarded the same message to them. Everyone wins. So I'm going to use this page to publish attachments (usually funny images) I've received by e-mail, so as to avoid filling folk's mailboxes.
There's one obvious problem with this (aside from being a solution only available to those with a public website): doing so publishes the attachment, which might infringe someone's copyright. Then again, the fact that the attachment is circulating by e-mail is equally an infringement of that copyright, though more wasteful and harder to police, so the only effects of my action are to save some folk some bandwidth and reduce the number of copies made, without compounding the infringement in any material manner.
While I have reasonable a priori grounds (i.e. it arrived in my in-box as part of a mass-mailing) for supposing that the authors of such attachments are happy to allow their works to be published, I don't have any reasonable means of determining who the author was, nor of confirming that they did abide by the law (i.e. not infringe someone else's copyright) when they published their work (i.e. sent it as an attachment to an e-mail). So, this warrants a
Copyright Notice
Works linked to or included in this page are copyright works of various folk, not generally known to me. Some of them may well be derivative works of other folk's copyrighted works. If you are the copyright-holder for any relevant work, I will be glad to give you due credit; I also acknowledge that, should you request that I remove the work covered by your copyright, I am bound to do so. In either case, you can contact me by e-mail to eddy@chaos.org.uk
and, obviously, please understand that it's pointless to make me take the work down, given that other folk are circulating it via e-mail all round the internet. But I acknowledge that copyright-holders do have the legal authority to require me to take down these works; along, more usefully, with the moral right to be attributed.
Warning
Images below have been gleaned from e-mails sent round the internet, usually as `humour'. It should be understood that they may be in singularly poor taste or, at the very least, some folk may find themselves taking offence at some of these images. Persons of a sensitive disposition should discover and exercise the `Back' functionality of their browser right now - read no further !
images, etc.
Insurance Policy(seen on May Day 2002 in London)
I read my e-mail using emacs' antique rmail package. I extract attachments using rmime-mode (or try here), which throws the images up using ImageMagic, which I then ask to save to png format.
Written by Eddy.