[p2p-research] More efficient (P2P?) usage of email, was: thinking about leapfrogging

[M. Fioretti]

Greetings,

please do not take what follows as trolling or anything like that. I'm
old and busy enough to know better than trolling, and when what I say
below happens in contexts where I don't really, deeply care about the
subject under discussion I simply ignore the whole thread and move on.

PARAGRAPH added just before sending: If I didn't find these
discussions really important and didn't care to remain involved, I'd
have simply trashed the whole thread, instead of spending more than
one hour trying to explain clearly what follows.

I'm writing this exactly because I do care about learning more about
P2P issues and contributing to discussions where I can, so I'd like to
participate, or at least learn by listening, in the most efficient way
possible.

Due to my job, I regularly (have to) follow some tenths of quite high
volume mailing lists.  On almost all of them, HTML posting, never
trimming very long messages before replying, top posting, posting
signatures which are one screen long, using non-standard quoting
markers (ie anything different than ">" characters at the beginning of
each line) are a sure way to be banned from the moderator or at least
killfiled by most other subscribers, if not flamed to death.

I am NOT going to flame anybody. I am just a bit frustrated because I
ignored email for 48 hours, when I opened it I found ~400 list
messages and... while getting and scanning hundreds of messages every
day is absolutely OK and normal for me, it's a standard part of my
job, this time the dozen most interesting ones, ie the leapfrogging
thread, are those which are most difficult and time consuming to read
(or reply to without making the problems above worse), for no really
important reason.

So, I am just going to list a few reasons why I suggest it could much
better to always avoid all the practices above and why doing so is
even more important in communities like this P2P one.

- there are tons of reasons why, even these days, it is much more
  sensible and considerate (unless you know for sure both the habits,
  limits and economic conditions of EVERYBODY who will receive your
  email) to trim as much as possible before replying to an email and
  to always avoid HTML or kilometric signatures. I can post the long
  list of such reasons if asked, for the moment please take my word
  for it. First, turn off html, then trim as much as possible, then
  reply, thanks.

- using ">" as quote marker guarantees that EVERY email client around
  will either color mark the replies or (even better) fold them to
  save screen space. In both cases, it will be much easier and faster
  to spot what is new and focus on it. Quoting in any other way,
  combined with the wildest variety of attribution formats, makes sure
  that in every thread longer than 5/6 messages there will be somebody
  who can't figure out without wasting half a day or taking notes who
  the heck said what to who.

- In general, people must attend to many different and unrelated
  things. There is no reason why any of us should have fresh in mind
  the real content and background of every message popping in one's
  inbox. And in this community it is very common practice to invite in
  CC other people during an ongoing discussion, and to enter, re-enter
  or exit discussions while they take place, with or without the list
  in CC. That's great and absolutely fine, but the practical result is
  that it is very common to find all of a sudden, in one's mailbox, 4
  or 5 messages about different branches of the same topic, and many
  of them have the form "X replies to Y who replied to Z who replied
  to Q who replied to...", but you had never seen any of the messages
  mentioned or quoted by X.

  In such a situation, making sense of what the discussion is and what
  happened before is quite a pain. One has to scroll ten pages down,
  then read backward through many badly formatted screenfuls of the
  same huge signatures resent over and over, what is left of assorted
  HTML formattings and quoting styles all mangling each other
  etc... to extract that 2% which is meaningful (most messages are 2/3
  lines of the "I agree" or "You're right, check this link too"
  variety pasted onto 6/7 screenfuls of already seen stuff). Whereas
  proper trimming, bottom posting, no HTML and standard quoting markup
  would make all the real content fit in one screen without any loss
  at all of real information.

  Again, the problem is not how many messages, it's how they come. If
  a message takes five minutes to decode, that is *not* to read the
  content, just to find and extract that content, I very often can't
  afford to read it. Days are short and I must use my computer time as
  efficiently as I can, sorry.

Sorry for the rant. No need to answer, feel free to ignore me, no
problem, really, and I still think you're all great guys who are doing
something important. I just wanted to let you know that, if sometimes
I seem to ignore a message, this is why.

Ciao,
		Marco

		(who will now _try_ anyway to get current with the
		leapfrogging thread)

-- 
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84