[wellylug] WellyLUG List Noise Levels

[David Antliff]

Hi,

I don't know how many people here use text-based email readers (pine,
mutt, mail, etc) but I use pine and it gives me a unique perspective on
this, and other, mailing lists. I miss out on all the pretty highlighting,
font size changes, embedded images and all that other completely
irrelevant and useless stuff. From my ascii-text viewpoint, I find this
list constantly *full* of 'noise' like redundant HTML versions of plain
text, encoded vcard signatures and page-long MIME-encoded smiley faces. It
actually makes reading the digest quite tiring.

So, I have a question - why do people use HTML in emails? Why do people
tag on images in their signatures? What is the point? How does it convey
more information than plain text? I realise there are ways to embed images
and other nasty things in an email, but who actually uses this other than
spammers and the occasional holiday snaps group-email? Surely if you have
something you HAVE to say via an image or some sort of HTML construct, you
could simply post it on a website somewhere and just include a link?

I expect to be ignored, but in the interests of doing our bit to reducing
total internet noise levels (a sort of cyber-environmentalism) let's all
drop the HTML and go back to the original concept of text-based simple
communication.

Had to be said - feel free to flame, I probably can't read it anyway.

Cheers,
David.

P.S. I use Pine because it's easily accessed remotely without the hassle
of setting up imap or something similar. It works well over ssh and inside
'screen'. If anyone knows of a 'plugin' for Pine that helps filter out
this redundant crud, please let me know. Otherwise I guess I'm going to
have to start running WellyLUG emails through postfix and a bunch of
filters. I'm not going to start using a graphical email client - that has
about as much appeal to me as trying to play a movie over dial-up VNC...