> I am using our local cable system (Charter Cable) to send my reply. I'm
> using Outlook and Microsoft XP. Is there a special trick to send replies to
> the mailing list?
You neeed to edit your replies. Since you are using Microsoft's
Virus Spreading Wizard [Outlook] I think in the Tools -> Options tab there
is a place to turn off the default behavior of including the entire
message to which you are replying. I may have to find a Windows box
and check the exact sequence. There are similar ways to avoid complete
quoting in other mail programs.
Basically, the problem, often referred to as TOFU, is a massive waste of
resources. The acronym comes from German, basically meaning original on
top, full reply under, but even with three years of German in high school
I can't remember the exact phrase.
The "death trailer" was added to most of the autox.team.net lists due to the
fact that some lists had about 80% of the bits they were pushing along the
wire being stuff people had already seen, and had no need to see again. The
analogy I used was it was like buying a 6 pack of your favorite beverage,
and getting one can of fresh, 5 cans of, uh, used beverage. So some simple
filters were put in place to reduce the waste.
There are lots of lists, about 4 to 5 millions messages go out a month to
around 15,000 addresses all over the world. All that useless quoting really
adds up in congestion on the network line in and out of the server, archive
sizes being much larger than they need to be, the indexing prgrams for the
searchable web search having to do a lot extra work both in the initial
indexing of repetitive paragraphs and performing searches for the user.
I mean, how useful is it to return the default limit of 50 matches if 40
of them are the same paragraph?
There is no real reason to include the complete text below one's message.
For example, I have only a few lines of the original message quoted above,
and indicated as a quote with the leading '>' character. I've edited the
reply to include only the bit of context neccessary. Quite often the subject
line alone is sufficient context, sometimes you may need to include a sentence
or two to provide proper references to your reply. I really doubt there
are cases where one needs to include full headers, signatures, and complete
texts of the original in replies.
Even with the death trailer, you still get people who for some reason think
that 'Edit your replies' means "send as much extra useless stuff as you wish
bog down the server, the network and overfill peoples mailboxes so mjb has
more admin work to do and just take out the few added lines."
I know you can't legislate common sense and the courtesy to show some respect
for the thousands of other subscribers on the many team.net lists, but being
an optimist at heart, I try anyway.
mjb.
|