On 19-Aug-23 09:54, John Levine wrote:
It appears that Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> said:
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.
[ discussion of how mail works these days ]
Are we going to tackle this mess?
I sure hope not. People already think we're out of touch old cranks
without rescuscitating complaints about top posting and HTML mail from
the prior millenium.
I catalogued a number of problems because I believe that their cumulative
effect has been damaging the effectiveness of IETF discussion and
consensus-forming for a number of years. My question is not whether we
can set the clock back. It's whether we can mitigate the damage in
some way.
I'll note in passing that discussion via GitHub issues avoids
most of these problems. Maybe that's why some people prefer it?
Brian
I do think it's reasonable to limit messages to something like 1MB,
enough for a large draft but not a giant Word file, to keep our lists
more usable.
Mail uses an infinitesimal share of the world's bandwidth and storage.
The sizes of the messages aren't really important other than how they
affect human readability. (Even the bandwidth issues go away once we
separate the mail and web site into different virtual machines, as
seems likely next year.) I use alpine, one of the most antique mail
programs around, and even it handles HTML just fine. Let's stick to
what matters.
R's,
John
