What follows is a mini-rant on email clients and the problems
therewith. Feel free to hit the delete key if you're not in the
mood.
>...Ron I don`t mean to be mean, but I think you missed the point.
Ron didn't miss the point. Ron is, as are many others, not
well-versed in setting up email client software (outlook, eudora, or
the various flavors of web-based readers like Yahoo and Hotmail).
Most folks assume that the way software comes configured from the
factory (the defaults) is the best way to run it, and (or) they
don't dig into how things work to see if maybe they want things
differently.
The people who program software defaults are following the example
set by Microsoft, which says, turn everything on and let the user
pull back. The old school of computing said, leave everything off
that you can, and let the user discover what they want turned on.
(If you haven't been on the list long enough to read one of my may
diatribes against Micro$oft, let's just say I'm from the old
school).
What this means is that, for most email programs, out of the box,
they send a plain text copy of your outgoing message, along
with a complete copy of message appended below. Then they add
an HTML code marked version of all that stuff to the message. This
creates a message like Ron sent - about 10 or so times as big as it
needs to be, clogging systems and mailboxes.
I know Ron and he's a relatively savvy guy, he's just not computer
savvy, like a lot of folks on this and other lists. I have been
waging a war against this kind of naievete for years. There are many
members of this list who are engaged in the same battle.
For the most part it really doesn't make a lot of difference to
people. Their mailboxes are already full of garbage, spam, and
viruses, so what's a little more, especially when it's just personal
mail.
For the list, and especially for folks who get the digest, it is
a big deal. It quadruples the size of your message (all that html
adds a lot of extra characters to the message) and it doesn't
display as text, it displays as code.
If you want to see what I mean, take a look at some of the messages
on the archive site at http://communication.ucsd.edu/shaku/Mail/
There are a lot of folks on the list who have a real problem with
this additional load. They're on servers with small mail quotas,
or reading email via a dialup connection and when messages are
substantially larger than they need to be, it eats up their
resources, reducing their ability to participate. Even folks like
myself who sit at the end of really fast lines and machines don't
need to see this stuff twice or in html. And it runs up the size of
the pages in the archive, so they take up more disk space and take
more time to download.
Please note, I'm not blaming users, nor am I attempting to chastise
them. It's not their fault. It is completely the fault of
programmers and their employers, who set the defaults so that the
mail client tries to do everything anyone could possibly want,
rather than defining those defaults narrowly and letting the user
add stuff as they like.
They are doing us all a huge disservice.
Unless this is the way folks want your messages to look, thay might
want to change the settings in their mail client.
As the bible says somewhere in John, "Come to terms with your ass,
for it bears you" (quoted, from memory, from the opening of John
Muir's *How to keep your Volkswagen Alive and Well*).
bj
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jan 06 2006 - 10:00:44 PST