ATTN SELF-STYLED LIST POLICE (was RE: Mr. Day)

[Thomas Cameron]

On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 08:48 +0000, Paul Howarth wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 02:46 -0600, Thomas Cameron wrote:
> > Those old arguments just don't hold up any more.  Disk space and
> > bandwidth is relatively cheap these days for most of the world.
> 
> And who cares about those that aren't "most"?
> 
> Paul.

It's not an issue of whether I care or not, and I'm certainly not going
to get into some chest-thumping spiel about how much or how little I
care.  

It's the reality of the composition of e-mail today.  Close to 100% of
e-mails transmitted are in either HTML or that God-awful Base64 MS-
TNEF/rich text format.  But even if all e-mail were forced to be plain
text, it would make almost no difference in bandwidth usage.

I love that people scream on the Fedora Core list about the bandwidth
"wasted" by e-mail (15 megs/month) but no one seems to remember that the
errata for FC3 is up to 2.6 GIGABYTES for i386 alone.

The first time someone fires up 'yum update,' they will find that their
e-mail traffic is just a drop in the bandwidth bucket.  The argument
about HTML mail taking up too much space/bandwidth just don't hold up
any more.  Relative to web browsing and software updates, e-mail is
inconsequential.

Thomas