On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 11:59:55AM -0600, David Young wrote: > One reason email software is not more useful is that because too many > smart people wage a losing war on the new, foreign ways of email instead > of programming filters that transform top-posted, red, 5000-column > emails to the style of email that they want to read. That's just sad.
What you do not grasp -- and this is not surprising, many people do not grasp this -- is that there is a direct causal relationship between proper netiquette and the usefulness of email. Let me give you one example, and then suggest, as part of further study, that you look at the basics of netiquette (such as: never top-posting, indenting/attributing quotes properly, and so on) that you consider how each of those has a similar backing rationale -- a rationale which made sense once upon a time, and still makes sense today. Let's consider full-quoting. *Why* does it matter? Decades ago, when it was first recognized that full-quoting was a terrible idea, part of that recognition stemmed from the scarcity and expense of bandwidth and storage. While some of us were lucky enough to have "fast" circuits thanks to ARPAnet connections, many others were sending email over UUCP which in turn was carried over 300/1200 baud dialup connections which in turn incurred long-distance call charges proportionate to the volume of traffic. It was recognized, by thoughful, considerate people who valued email as a communications medium for all, not just the lucky few, that the simple courtesy of trimming excess quoted material -- a few seconds' work for any minimally-competent user -- could and would save money and time not only for many recipients, but for those handling the email in transit (neither senders nor recipients) who were generously contributing some of their scarce resources to facilitate communication. It was clearly the courteous thing to do, which is why those who failed to do it were frequently chastised for their discourtesy. Fast-forward to today. And while the underlying technologies have changed, the virtue of frugality hasn't. Because there are still people who are on relatively low-bandwidth/high-cost connections, and there are still people generously contributing their resources to facilitate third-party email communication. Moreover, and this is something that wasn't a concern all those years ago, email is now quite often a conduit for abuse and attacks (e.g., spam, phish, malware) so there are, as I presume everyone knows, numerous resources deployed to scrutinize email messages for those -- and in the case of many, resources used are proportional to message size. [1] Consider also -- in the case of mailing lists -- the archives. Both their size and their suitability for search indexing are adversely affected by excessive and incorrect quoting. [2] Consider also the situation of those who are, unfortunately, saddled with email storage quotas. [3] Consider also...ah, but by now, the thoughtful reader will already be enumerating his/her own list of instances where excessive quoting has a direct, if small, impact on the usefulness of email as a communications medium. In other words, all these years later, bandwidth and storage and human time *still* matter. In different ways, of course, but not everyone is so lucky as to have mail accounts without quotas, terabytes of backing storage, plenty of free/cheap bandwidth, and lots of free time. Those who do should always be mindful of those who don't. Now there will be people who will observe that the aggregate cost of all this may be tiny. And that the inconvenience to users they will never meet (that is: by wasting their valuable personal and professional time by forcing them to scroll through excess quoted material over and and over and over again) is of no concern. Perhaps in some cases the cost IS tiny. But the aggregate total over all email messages is enormous. Exercise for the reader: go through the last month's traffic on *this* list. Trim out all the excess quoted material. Compare size to original. Calculate difference in bandwidth charges for someone reading their email on a mobile device connected to a service which charges by-the-byte. [4] And as to the inconvenience to users they will never meet, there is no way to truly quantify that. Nor is there any way to compel senders to take it into consideration -- except to appeal to their basic human decency, and ask that they THINK about the many recipients of their messages...and put their situations, needs, resources, time ahead of their own. The few seconds that it takes any competent email user to trim quoted material is a small thing compared to the large amount of aggregate time spent by recipients scrolling through it...again. And again. And again. We call that consideration "courtesy". And being courteous to people you will never meet, for that matter, people whose existence you may never even be aware of (because they lurk on a mailing list and never post) is one of the cornerstones of netiquette. ---rsk [1] This should not be taken as tacit approval for such techniques. I've written elsewhere, at great length, about why I think that content scanning is a terrible idea. But my opinion aside, it's obviously quite common and much of the software used runs in O(n) or greater. [2] A back-of-the-envelope quality study of a dozen quasi-randomly selected mailing lists suggests that those where excessive quoting is common have archives approximately an order of magnitude larger than they need be, with corresponding effects on space requirements, server bandwidth, and search accuracy. [3] I consider email quotas to be a worst practice in email system engineering, but just as in [1], my opinion aside, they are obviously quite common. [4] Not everyone is so fortunate as to have other options.
