NYCkayaker Knotty threads

[Rich Kulawiec]

[ I am sooooo gonna hate myself for wading into this.  But it's either
pontificate on this or go another couple of rounds with a disk drive
that's resisting attempts to make it work...so I think I'll borrow the
soapbox for a minute, then go look for a crowbar.  Or maybe a mallet.
But either way I'll go back to being quiet after this. ]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 06:38:31PM -0500, mjamesone at aol.com wrote:
> On the other hand, not including the reply chain -- or over editing
> of replies -- can often leave the reader at a loss as to the meaning and
> context of the current reply. As long as the reply appears at the top,
> it's easy enough to skip the rest.

I think you're missing the point.  Both top-posting and full-quoting
have been considered very rude since I started on the 'net -- and that
was 27 years ago, so the convention predates that.

And as the original poster pointed out, it's NOT easy to skip the rest
when one is reading the list as a digest.  Moreover, including all that
material over and over and over again bloats the digest but adds no value.
It also makes it makes it more difficult to search both digests and the
list archives.

Consider that not everyone has a high-speed or flat-rate connection; some
people are on dialup, and some pay by the byte.  This slows down their
mail delivery and/or costs them more money -- again, for no added value.

Consider that some people have mail quotas on their accounts, and so
threads which include the same text over and over again chew up space
that could be better used.

Consider that some anti-spam filters which examine content begin to raise
their little digital eyebrows when they keep seeing the same content
over and over again in messages that claim to be from different people.

Consider that not everyone uses the same operating system that you do
or the same mail client.  What is easy for you may not be so for them,
and vice versa.   This is one reason why mailing list messages need
to be tailored to the needs of the many, not the one.

Consider that it only takes a few seconds to edit a message down to those
portions that need to be reproduced to provide context -- deleting in
the process not only irrelevant text but boilerplate such as signatures
and mailing list headers/footers.  Those who will not take that time are
saying to all their fellow list-members "my time is worth more than all
of yours combined".

And so on.

These are [some of] the reasons why the conventions of email netiquette have
developed.  They're meant to make things work for everyone, and to avoid
wasting system/network resources as well as human time.

	[ I'm on a lot, and I do mean, a LOT, of mailing lists.
	I conservatively estimate that 80% of the traffic across all of
	them is superfluous.  The includes excessive quoted material,
	boilerplate legalese, overly-long signatures, HTML markup,
	and other cruft.  Some of those lists have tens of thousands
	of members.  The aggregate waste is appalling. ]

So while I wrote the Miss Mailers FAQ in a smartass tone, it was my
hope that people would read it -- and read the documents it references,
some of which aren't so glib -- and learn from all of them.

So my request is that you (generic "you", not just you in particular) go
read it and then try to put it into practice as your way of helping the
entire Internet function just a little bit better.

	ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/mail/miss-mailers

And it may even make you laugh.

---Rsk