On Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 4:56 AM tom petch <daedulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
The Mesh takes entirely the opposite approach.
Push messages are currently limited to 32KB, we are discussing reducing that.
Anything above the push limit has to be sent as a push notification to pull the full message.
What this means is that I can receive all my messages on a modestly powered device and store the complete archive without requiring an absurd amount of storage. I have just over half a million messages in Gmail, that would be 8GB at 16KB per message, can easily store all that on my laptop, phone.
Pull messages are essentially a sort of attachment, but one that is much more flexible. So if I record 5TB of video, I can email the whole lot to my editor with one message. And when they receive it, we give them the tools so they can pull it once onto their own video storage vault and manage it from there.
People still seem to have difficulty understanding where the Web came from. It didn't come from people who were obsessed with protocols. It came with people who were frustrated that computer systems are so hard to use. In the case of CERN, it was because CN division insisted on trying to force everyone to use the obsolete pile of IBM junk they just paid $30 million for. A pile of junk with a highly customized operating system written at CERN by people with no understanding of usability.
Oh and according to someone who would have been on the other end of it at the time, the whole place was crawling with spies because the original reason governments funded CERN in the first place was to put them in one place so they could be watched.
One reason the Web took off is that after the cold war was ended through the Kennedy/Carter/Reagan information engagement strategy, they were looking to do the same globally. The 'bring down the wall' faction thought the Dulles strategy of suppressing democracy and installing convenient dictators was a failure, propping up instability is how one of them put it. They recognized the potential of the Web long before there were any stories in the mainstream media. But the reason it was the Web and not something else was largely because of where it was developed.
