snip extraneous quotes from your posts to the list, dammit

[Peter l Jakobi]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 08:55:24PM +0100, Sharpe, Sam J wrote:
> 2009/9/13 Peter l Jakobi <lists at kefk.oa.shuttle.de>:
> 
> Again, I'm not too fussed - I work in a Microsoft Environment where
> most people do this - I respect the etiquette guidelines of the list
> on this, but I don't usually castigate people for it.

On  a  good  day,  my  tolerance is a bit  higher  for  this  kind  of
inpoliteness.  But  after  10 hours or so this grows thin. And  in  my
spare  time  after hours, there's also the added lack of  payment  for
tolerating such behaviour.


Top-posting  might make sense to contain the full history within  each
mail in a 1:1 exchange in a biz setting.

But  it breaks BADLY as soon as more people participate (other than as
silent cc:-to-archive or cc:-to-management recipients). In the general
case it's really nice to observe that soon NOBODY will have either the
complete  list  of recipients or the full history of  the  discussion.
With  subsequent  wasted  time, uninformed project  members  and  more
expensive  side-effects. 

Get  the peanuts, lean back and enjoy the chaos. But also be  prepared
for   the  risk  of  late-night  after-hours  obligatory-participation
telephone conferences...


A  saner work-around for this would be a single mailinglist alias plus
a list archive to keep the history. Like this list offers.

But  then  there's no more "need" at all for keeping "the  history  as
TOFU" and wasting a large number of recipients' time...


What's  that  saying? "On the internet, it's always  September".  IMHO
outlook's  TOFU tendencies rather add to the mess school accounts  and
AOL  created. 

Perhaps  it's  just time to extend the usual SPAM filter with  a  TOFU
filter  to  blackhole  such  postings early both  at  the  mailinglist
alias-level  and  in the personal .procmailrc... . Maybe even  with  a
polite  posting  pointing to the netiquette and some  instructions  on
proper email reformatting for successful redistribution :>.

-- 
cu
Peter l Jakobi
lists at kefk.oa.shuttle.de