From: ietf <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> on behalf of John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> Sent: 18 August 2023 21:54 To: ietf@xxxxxxxx Subject: Re: The IETF's email mess [was: RE: Large messages to 6man list] It appears that Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> said: > >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 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. <tp> True but irrelevant! It takes a large part of the time I set aside for work and the amount of work I get done has been much reduced, halved perhaps, because of text/html. As others have said, it adds nothing and subtracts a lot and with the webmail I am obliged to use, the results are very bad news. I do not want all those html links chased down across the world, I do not want images and movies downloaded to my PC; if I cannot understand the message from the text, I do not want the message. Either the IETF should strip all html before forwarding e-mails to a list, or webmail providers should be REQUIRED to provide an option to display only text/plain and to suppress any text/html (just like all MUA that I have ever had the privilege to use have offered me). The situation has got a lot worse with the PC software of the past few years with it's obsession with controlling a user's life, with updates, downloads and general trashing of a user's ability to do what the user wants to do. </rant> Tom Petch 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
