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Statistics -- richmail utility

1991-06-10 16:50:39
I've dug up (with help from Mark Sherman) some numbers that might
provide some insight into why I think something like richmail is so
important.

Some of the CMU folks analyzed the messages that appeared on an Andrew
bulletin board at CMU.  The bboard they analyzed was a private one for
the ITC, the place where Andrew was developed, so it can probably be
assumed to be one of the "best case" scenarios for multimedia mail --
that is, nearly everyone is fairly sophisticated and well-versed in the
mechanisms of multimedia mail.  They analyzed two months' worth of
traffic on the bboard, to see which of the multimedia mechanisms were
most heavily used.  Naturally, you would expect lower multimedia usage
rates in a less sophisticated and less homogeneous community.  However,
these data are interesting for the insight they give into which features
are useful enough to be commonly used by at least *some* community.

During those two months, 369 messages were posted on this bulletin
board.  They can be broken down as follows:

plain text (corresponds to RFC-XXXX "text"): 79
multifont formatted text ("text-plus/richmail" level): 258
text containing embedded multimedia objects:  22

Now, there's lots of room for analysis of the latter 22, but I find the
258 quite compelling.  At least to this one community, Andrew's
multimedia facilities are very useful, but "richmail" alone would cover
91% of the uses to which Andrew is being put.  Andrew is something like
half a million lines of code, and a minimal richmail displayer is 40
lines.  Given the appeal of reducing code size by a factor of fifty
thousand, I think the richmail idea is worth pursuing...

(Note to angry multimedia fans:  I don't really believe that something
like richmail can replace something like Andrew or Diamond.  I just
believe that it would be incredibly valuable as a lingua franca and
could plausibly become one far in advance of a standardized way to do
the fancier stuff.)

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