[TriLUG] Why the message size limit? [Was: Your message to TriLUG awaits moderator approval]

[Brian via TriLUG]

<blah blah attachments, untrimmed responses, etc>

Realistically, this issue bothers me approximately never, but here are 
my thoughts on the subject anyway. :-)

As it applies to attachments causing the size limit to be hit, couldn't 
the system that checks size limit requirements be smart enough to treat 
text/plain (or even, $deity forbid, text/html) MIME types differently 
from application/* types when deciding how big the message is?

i.e. Aaron Joyner's 25 kB information-rich text shouldn't be graded the 
same way as joe_blow's 162 bytes of text plus 24 kB of image attachment.

That doesn't address the concern of huge text sections that are 1% 
original and 99% quoted, of course, but I wonder how often the size 
limit actually comes into play in practice, when dealing with that.

As far as digest subscribers, well, they signed up for a digest. 
Sometimes threads are long.  Caveat emptor, I say.

As far as archival storage, give me a break.  Our archives show weekly 
gzipped text files rarely larger than a few kB all the way back to 2001. 
  52 weeks a year, an incredibly generous 100 kB/week, over 20 years, is 
barely over 100 MB.  A single CD-R would cover over 100 years. 
Archiving is not the problem.

OTOH, how about simply raising the limit to 50 kB?  50 kB is chump 
change in today's world, and would probably permanently eliminate the "I 
actually typed too much" moderation scenario.

-Brian