Further, here is a quote from the web address in the new footer that
explains what has happened and why it was done.
---------------quote----------------
You didn't edit your reply.
Basically, the problem, often referred to as TOFU, is a waste of limited
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 over 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, and about 4 to 5 millions messages go out every
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
programs 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 49 of them are the same paragraph?
There is no real reason to include the complete text below one's message.
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 to 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."
If for some reason you are using Microsoft's Virus Spreading Wizard, aka
Outlook, in the Tools -> Options menu you can change the setting to NOT
include the entire orginal message in your reply. Other mail programs
should have similar settings, check your documentation.
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.
--
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Miq Millman miq@bigllama.com
Tualatin, OR Big Llama Productions
oletrucks is devoted to Chevy and GM trucks built between 1941 and 1959
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