Felix Miata wrote:
On 2009/04/23 12:51 (GMT-0700) John Andersen composed:
None of the people lamenting these rare attachments have claimed that they are on slow or expensive connections.
No, but apparently you glossed over or ignored what I consider major points of my previous post, which are:
1-the overall load large attachments put on the email system (and the whole internet) generally, not on specific subscribers on slow or metered connections
2-the fact that every (non-kmail) subscriber has to download individual mails of a size equal in class to the unwanted large size of typical spam
What? No they don't. If I read email in thunderbird on any os on a netbook, or in the palmos mail client in my Centro, or in my email servers web interface , or in any email client I think I've ever seen, there is the option to only download headers and in some cases like the Palm, the option to only download N kB per message. If there is a client that lacks this feature and it isn't outlook or outlook express, then it's such a ridiculous minority that it's not wrong to allow everyone else to operate in greater convenience and efficiency and tough luck charlie for that one oddball client. Especially since even that one oddball client would only have a problem if several other factors also applied. They would have to need to follow the opensuse mail list, not be able to use the web interface to it for some reason, and be on a slow or expensive enough link to be a problem, AND the list would have to have started suffering abuse of the feature which it hasn't. In other words, there is simply no problem that requires fixing here. Just like html which you also wrongly accused of being harmful without qualification, it's harmful only when abused and useful if not abused. Further, when not abused, it's actually more bother all around than it's worth trying to prevent it so religiously. Although a plain-text only, no-attachement list is more efficient in one sense, there is also some overhead elsewhere from not having those features available. So it's a matter of which costs more. If I send an email in "html" that has nothing but the html, body and a pre tag, I have benefitted a lot from only adding... 37 bytes to the message, In return I have caused the majority of email clients to display the screen shot or report output or whatever in the only way that will be legible, or at least in the way that will be most clear and waste the least of everyones time and cause the least amount of misinterpretation, and avoided the waste of recipients who simply skip over the message because it looks like scrambled garbage or isn't easy enough to pick apart, or wasting time back & forth telling some in subsequent messages "oh you have to tell your email client to use a fixed width font..." or wasting time writing a paragraph about that in the original post (for every such post all my life...), and the time wasted by the reciepient having to go futz with their client if they were even motivated enough to do so, which they mostly wouldn't be. It's retarded, that's why a standard and a protocol was devised wherein a message can supply metadata within itself to inform the display device how to best render the content. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making use of any metadata facility that's available. Rather the opposite, relying on assumed or expected or default behavior is the definition of poor design and unrobust procedure. Attachements are just more of the same. They can be abused, but so can air or water or... Trying to raise an argument about it for no reason has probably cost everyone more time in the form of posts like this one than any attachement or html content has yet cost anyone. So thanks for that. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org