On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 10:58:15AM +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
I disagree. Headers have exploded, and many messages (especially those
on mailinglists, which would be the bulk of all messages for many
people) only use text. Header-to-text ratio varies between 10/90% and
80/20%.
Perhaps we should answer two questions:
1. Is it important what these figures are?
2. If so, can we get some accurate measures of them rather than guessing?
I will
say that mail quoting is a much larger part these days with the mail
bandwidth, especially the form of reply behavior where people reply at
the
top (no inline quoting, commenting) and simply keep addending the mail
thread.
This is evil. Too bad you can't shoot people who do this.
Somebody at work the other day, on the technical team (OK, a web designer)
made fun of me the other day because I put my answers "inside other's
people's e-mail instead of putting it all at the top like you should do". I
then proceeded to give her a stern talking to. She didn't listen.
In the same way popular media think emoticons were born out of mobile phone
text messaging, I suspect we might be about to lose the battle on
top-posting.
I think it would be good to address quoting and over-quoting in a new
protocol. If we can address over-quoting by embedding a pointer to the
original message rather than the original message, that should save a
good deal of bandwith and it makes it very simple to configure a user
agent to disregard this and not display it. For regular quoting this
gets a bit more complicated, but it's worth the effort as this way we
get to cryptographically protect the quoted text.
Indeed. I was thinking about this before. If you were to allow for being
able to successfully pull back the original message and check the signature
on it, you would be able to establish that when quoting you, I was in fact
quoting you...
--
Paul Robinson