[Not about] Random Sampling of e-mail services.

[Kurt Cockrum]

Reference: <Pine.SUN.3.96.981003014452.21676B-100000 at scn>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.981003054926.17890A-100000 at scn>

Allen said:
>[...]
>do not have this option.  I strongly urge all of you on this list to please
>edit your headers...I know I am not the only one getting really tired of
>3-6 copies of every response to this and some other subject lines.  
>[...]

AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!  and while we are on the topic, I'd like to suggest
that people edit the bodies of their e-mail replies better.  I really get
tired of seeing stuff I've seen before, prefixed with ">".  Imagine if
we had to do this in our verbal conversations!  We'd have to develop a
"quoting" voice-intonation, analogous to the ">", to keep the conversation
straight, lest it start sounding like an echo :) ...and how would we
voice the equivalent of ">>", ">>>", ...?
Maybe `she0 goes, "she1 goes, "she2 goes, "...""'?  The mind boggles...

It seems sort of paradoxical that the wide-spread use of computer
applications that are "user-friendly" should result in so much widespread
rudeness to "non-users".  It looks like some sort of zero-sum game
operating here.  User wins (more convenience), everybody else loses
(time, bandwidth, storage space).  Iterate over the whole e-mail-using
population.  What a demoralizing prospect!  No wonder even the old salts
have thrown in the towel.  I hear that Gene Spafford, author of various
netiquette essays ("Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions" (I may have
the title wrong)) in times past, has given up and stopped revising his
stuff in despair that anybody was paying attention anyway.

The pattern has happened in other areas of life, where mass adoption
of individual conveniences has resulted in ripple-effects of mass
inconvenience.  Automobiles, for instance, or telephones; all once great,
now only pains-in-the-collective-butt...
--kurt
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *  From the Listowner  * * * * * * * * * * * *
.	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
majordomo at scn.org		In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe scn
END