sig cruft

[bob at sinister.com (Bob Keyes)]

OK I hit upon a touchy subject....didn't meat to start a war. My $.02: I
asked because it has become bad enough that It bothers me. It used to be a
single line on the bottom of a message. Now it is MOST of a given message.
Combine this with your personal sig, and the mailing list sig, it gets a
bit heavy. I am not trying to pick on one free email provider, though.

I don't have any sig. I wish more people didn't. I have never found it
useful. If you're looking for my web page, it's exactly where you might
expect it to be, by looking at my email address. My name is in the message
header. Anything else you need, you can get from my web page if I want you
to have it. People with sigs, at least try to prune them down to 3 lines
or less.

PGP signatures might be useful, if they were used. Generally they are not.
Ideally I wouldn't see such a thing, the mailer would intercept and verify
it, stripping the signature.

I run a mailing list, and use ezmlm. It would be great if I could get some
sort of plugin that remembers and strips sigs. The concept isn't that
hard. Implementation might be a problem though.



On Sun, 28 Apr 2002, Derek D. Martin wrote:

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> At some point hitherto, Adam Russell hath spake thusly:
> > I don't know the answer to the question. If more than one person is
> > bothered by the advertising the bigmailbox.com peple put at the
> > bottom I guess I could use a different address. Although, yahoo,
> > hotmail, and pretty much all other free webmail types do this I
> > would go as far as to say that one would have to be pretty thin
> > skinned and have a pretty boring life to have this bother them.
>
> Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Often people make assumptions about what other's
> situations are, based on their own (often limited) experience.  The
> above strikes me as an example of that phenomenon.
>
> Consider for a moment the content of this message to which I am
> replying.  You wrote 6 lines of text, in response to 2 lines of text.
> Yet the message was more like fifty lines long, filled mostly with
> multiple appendages of e-mail ads.  The vast majority of your
> message was bloat about which no one (other than the advertisers)
> cares one iota.  It contained roughly 400% as much junk as actual
> content.
>
> Now, on a single message basis, this isn't a big deal.  However
> consider that people who are on mailing lists get a lot of such mail.
> And if they're on multiple mailing lists (which is fairly likely), the
> amount of such mail is multiplied still.  Many of these people STILL
> can't get better connections than 28.8kbps modems, and download their
> mail via POP connection on that slow link.  Downloading their mail now
> takes somewhere between 3 to 5 times longer than it should, because
> people refuse to take an extra few seconds to trim their replies,
> and/or use e-mail addresses that add a boatload of cruft to the end
> of their messages.
>
> To make matters worse, while it's no longer common around here, there
> are still people who pay for their connection based on bandwidth
> usage.  Downloading all this extra junk in e-mail COSTS THEM MONEY.
> This is most common outside the U.S. these days, but is not unheard of
> here, and also lists like this one often have subscribers from all
> over the world.  It's counter-intuitive that a local LUG mailing list
> would have such members, but often they do.  I'm not sure about BLU,
> but I know for a fact that another local LUG list I'm on has people
> from Texas and from farther west, and (though I don't know if this is
> still true) have also had subscribers from Europe.
>
> Leaving unnecessary cruft in e-mail also often makes it difficult for
> the reader to find your message.  The bottom line is it's simply
> inconsiderate, no matter how you slice it.  And given how often people
> do complain about it on all sorts of mailing lists, I'd have to say it
> does bother rather a lot of people.  You can make your own judgements
> about how thin-skinned or boring they are...
>
> - --
> Derek Martin               ddm at pizzashack.org
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