Hi,
I'd like to take a slightly different approach, and hence
have moved this from tools-discuss because it's not (just)
a tools issue.
We have an ongoing disaster that is making email much less effective for the IETF and we aren't talking about it.
- There's the old story about top-posting vs in-line comments.
(Too make your life harder, this message does both, although
IMHO top-posting should be used rarely, mainly for changes of
tack like this one. In-line comments are almost always better
in an ongoing conversation.)
- Flowed vs line-wrapped.
(For many years everybody wrapped their messages at about
column 72, or even less. These days, we have an unholy
mixture of wrapped and flowed text with no obvious pattern and it makes long discussions harder and harder as they go on and on and on, and is compounded by the next problems.)
- Monospaced fonts vs variable width.
(For many years everybody used monospace and it was common to
include ASCII art in emails. Today, that's essentially broken.
I've also seen messages where apparently there were tables
that have been converted to a variable-width font but of course
don't line up at all in the receivers MUA.)
- Different mechanisms for quoting.
(For many years, a simple ">" at the start of each quoted
line did the job, and quoted quoted quotes
looked like this.
But now we seems to see multiple quoting methods
depending on which MUA is operating. There's also a
nasty interaction between CRLF and LF line endings
that sometimes affects quoting
in a weird way.
)
- And of course some people insist on sending HTML mail
and assume that the result will be legible and
comprehensible despite the fact that they use colours
and fonts and font sizes that are unsuitable for many
readers and/or their MUAs. A conversation that consists
of a mixture of plain text and HTML messages rapidly
becomes a swamp.
Are we going to tackle this mess?
(Some more in-line comments below.)
On 18-Aug-23 21:35, Vasilenko Eduard wrote:
Hi IETF new IT,
It is radicules that participants of many WGs could not just push “Reply” to a message in the most common e-mail program in the world.
I don't see that as ridiculous (and I don't know which MUA you mean).
We need to trim it (loose context),
The full context is the mail thread, and can always be found, but what matters is that the new comment can be read in the appropriate context. I've never had to trim *relevant* context, although I certainly intentionally trim irrelevant context. (I won't trim this message so that people who didn't see it on tools-discuss can read to the end, but that won't take it anywhere near a limit.)
convert it to text (loose HTML features),
As I said above, losing HTML features is no loss.
and control it manually so that the message would not cross the 80KB limit.
I had no idea there was a limit on 6man. I can't imagine a *useful* message
in a conversation that needs that many characters. (Yes, occasionally
people choose to review a draft by including 100% of the text; I've never
understood why.)
Could we release this limit to something like 1MB?
PS: My 3 previous employers (for 25 years) restrict messages to 10MB.
As Robert Sparks pointed out, allowing anything like that on mailing lists
creates a significant amount of network traffic. It also fills thousands
of disks around the world with redundant megabytes and contributes to
global warming. I'm quite aware of the ridiculous message sizes in
corporate networks - the combined effects of front-posting and rich text -
and I think it's unquestionably a bad thing. In fact, one of my employers
introduced automatic message expiry and deletion after six months as a
result, which had very negative side effects.
Regards
Brian
Eduard
*From:*Glen Barney via RT [mailto:support@xxxxxxxx]
*Sent:* Friday, August 18, 2023 6:02 AM
*To:* Vasilenko Eduard <vasilenko.eduard@xxxxxxxxxx>
*Subject:* [rt5.ietf.org #20604] RE: Large messages to 6man list
Hello -
You've reached the IETF Support center - we're the platform operators for the IETF - and this address exists to allow for the reporting of services which are down or malfunctioning.
Your question pertains more to operating policy of the IETF, and settings used by them for the operation of their services. If you feel that a policy should be changed, please reach out to the Tools Team on thetools-discuss@xxxxxxxx <mailto:tools-discuss@xxxxxxxx> and voice your opinion.
I should mention that the IETF infrastructure is in a transition mode - they are moving all of their services from their current provider (us) to new hosting under design. It is likely that your concern will be addressed as a part of that transition, but, again, you can voice your opinion there if you wish and let them know.
Thank you,
Glen
--
Glen Barney
IT Director
AMS (Outgoing IT Platform Provider)
On Thu Aug 17 02:34:02 2023,vasilenko.eduard@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:vasilenko.eduard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi IETF IT,
Is it possible to improve the default message restriction?
Keeping history is much more convenient if the investigation is needed
later (for a particular topic). Context is important but lost when
messages are trimmed.
It is 2023 now. Storage space is much cheaper https://diskprices.com/ <https://diskprices.com/>.
What is the reason for the 80k restriction? (I assume historically)
Eduard
-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Hinden [mailto:bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx>]
Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2023 6:15 PM
To: Pascal Thubert (pthubert) <pthubert@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:pthubert@xxxxxxxxx>>
Cc: Bob Hinden <bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx>>; Ole Troan
<otroan=40employees.org@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:otroan=40employees.org@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>>; Vasilenko Eduard
<vasilenko.eduard@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:vasilenko.eduard@xxxxxxxxxx>>
Subject: Re: Large messages to 6man list
Generally the solution to this is to not just reply and send,, but to
delete the reply history from the email. Otherwise for long
discussions, the emails keep getting bigger and bigger.
Bob
> On Aug 16, 2023, at 2:35 AM, Pascal Thubert (pthubert)
> <pthubert@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:pthubert@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>
> Oups!
>
> Sorry Ole.
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Ole Troan <otroan=40employees.org@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:otroan=40employees.org@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>>
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2023 4:07 PM
>> To: Pascal Thubert (pthubert) <pthubert@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:pthubert@xxxxxxxxx>>; Vasilenko
>> Eduard
>> <vasilenko.eduard@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:vasilenko.eduard@xxxxxxxxxx>>
>> Cc: Bob Hinden <bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx>>
>> Subject: Large messages to 6man list
>>
>> Pascal, Vasilenko,
>>
>> You are still posting too large messages to the 6man list. Over the
>> 80KB message limit.
>> The consequence of that is that we have to manually approve them, or
>> they might not make it to the list.
>>
>> O.
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