who cares if you send them to all. Just don't download if
you don't want it.
I'm going to use this comment as the basis for what could turn out to be a
fairly long and rambling rant. I'll try to keep it concise.
This comment is one that crops up with some degree of regularity on the 60 or
so lists run from here. The FOT list is a mere drop in the bucket, with about
80 folks, a bit more than one half of one percent of the roughly 12,000 entries
on all the lists, so don't worry, in terms of the 50 or 60 hours per month I
put into these lists, this one is fairly painless. Actually, at the moment the
FOT list is a bit smaller than it was before the picture was sent out, since
I had to remove a couple of folks whose mailboxes were not prepared for such an
unforeseen onslaught.
This sort of "don't download it if you don't want it" idea is usually offered
up by some one who has no idea how email works, and sees no problem at all with
trying to send large images and such around in email. I won't get into one of
my AOL rants here, I'll try to be nice. It would be nice to come up with some
sort of analogy to help these folks who don't understand email realize
there may be more to it than they think. By the time the very large email
shows up on their front door, they don't realize how much effort has been
expanded in getting it to their doorstep already. They never think about the
number of computers on the net that have had to shuffle these bits around.
They never think about the countless number of system administrators along the
varied paths the message has taken, who work too hard for too little trying to
keep the required boxes running error free, so that they can casually send or
discard whopping big messages at their whim. And I bet that there were not too
many of you on this list who had tp spend any time dealing with email bounces
from list members whose mailboxes had filled up because this message had been
sent.
AOL people don't realize that when they choose to not download a very large
message it is like seeing a big box on the front porch that some delivery guy
left there, and deciding not to bring it in. Sure, it isn't in their house,
but they are not at all thinking of the effort already expended to get it
across the country and onto their front porch. Ignoring the box on the porch
won't make the delivery guy's back feel any better that night. When that
message shows up in your list of new mail, the work involved in getting it
there, and any damage done along the way, has already been done.
Actually this has happened before, folks sending out large files, and list
members complaining about it. I've been sort of ignoring the whole thing, but
I guess it is now time to have this list filtered through a program or two that
will check for various things, like overly large messages, before it gets sent
out. Could be a few days before I actually get this in place, as the new
semester starts in about 10 hours, and I'll have quite a handful with various
tasks related to that.
For now, I'll just request that folks show some intelligence and consideration
for fellow list members when contemplating sending something out to all of them.
mjb.
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