[Nottingham] Maillist notes

[James Gibbon]

On Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:19:49 +0100
Michael Simms <michael at tuxgames.com> wrote:

> Actually the more I think about it...
> 
> Trimming messages...
> OK, sounds fine, in the days of 300 baud modems. Today, your emails that 
> are trimmed to, well lets say this one were I to trim off the crud, it 
> would save 1056 bytes, which on the slowest modern internet connection 
> is about 0.004 seconds of downloading. As opposed to the 20 seconds it 
> would take me to trim. Not very efficient. And if you are top-posting, 
> as I obviously advocate, it is completely unnecessary too, as you wont 
> see the excess.
> 

I think you're missing the point. Emails responding to messages that are
trimmed appropriately are dramatically more readable in general, and it's
simply inconsiderate to deliver a pile of "crud", as you even describe
it yourself, to a large distribution.

I would dispute your figures - it shouldn't take you 20 seconds to trim
a post properly - but in any case you haven't taken into account the fact
that the downloading time wasted is multiplied by the number of
recipients. There are other factors too, such as the increased time it
takes people to search through a particular mail folder because someone
has seen fit to include "crud".



James