Fernando's massive sig(now off-topic but in-thread)

[Bart Silverstrim]

(``-_-´´) -- Fernando wrote:
> On 8/14/07, Matt Morgan <minxmertzmomo at gmail.com> wrote: <snip>
>> As a pretty new member of the list ... actually it's a pretty easy 
>> room. This is a big, public list and he's irritating thousands of 
>> people with each message. It's rude; yet people are asking him
>> nicely to stop.
>> 
>> He won't listen, so I'm going to take his advice and send all his 
>> messages to the bitbucket. His loss.
>> 
>> --Matt
> 
> Matt, tell me, what am I doing that is so irritating? A simple
> signature?

While I'm not Matt, I am a bit of an email retentive...

It's not hard to be irritated by people's email habits when you spend a 
great deal of time using email and communicating with people via the 
typed word.

Here's some points to consider...

A) quoting.  I don't need to see a person's #$%@ sig three or four times 
because the quoter is too lazy to trim it down.  Unfortunately it's 
common, so the best approach is to not put it in in the first place.  I 
mainly need to know who you are, maybe your digital signature if you're 
worried about authenticity.  Most people don't need ASCII art or silly 
quotes, etc...this is a discussion/tech group, please reserve that 
information for private email.

B) Top posting...WHY WASTE THE SPACE.  Worse, I have a huge problem 
scrolling to the bottom, move up, read down, scroll up a chunk, read 
down, scroll back up...hint: if I don't know about something later 
despite your three or four pages of quoted top posted crap you forwarded 
me, it's because I deleted it.  I have better things to do than make 
heads or tails of your convoluted inability to format and craft a 
document in a presentable and organized fashion or because you think 
email is a convenient place to slap a one line mental fart at the top of 
a few paragraphs you're replying to or act like email is a new form of 
instant messaging. "I do it to keep track of the previous conversations 
in one place."  That's what threading is for.  I don't need eight copies 
of gradually growing messages because you're too lazy to trim out 
unnecessary crap and stick to the topic.  Admit it.  You suck at 
editing.  I only need the whole mail when I'm sending a forward that 
needs to be preserved..."This arrived in my mailbox.  What do you make 
of it? QUOTE...."

C) I don't need a constant reminder of who you are in your messages; 
place a link to a website with all your info if need be.  I get 
downright p@#%sed off when your sig is bigger than that content you 
added to the message.  See "mental fart" above.

D) Why the stupid "legalese" sigs people have slapped into messages? 
Can any produce ONE CASE where it was legally enforceable? It's stupid 
to put in anything about "we're not liable for potential viruses in this 
message".  Look, it's a virus.  You think it's going to go through the 
trouble of sticking your disclaimer in there?  DUH!  Or "If this wasn't 
addressed to you, delete this message..."  Moron, you put it at the 
bottom.  I'm afraid I already know about your secret recipe for 
kick-butt chili and how much you think auntie-susan's recipe sucks.  Or 
does this only fall under your "This message doesn't necessarily reflect 
our company's official viewpoint" disclaimer?  I challenge you to find 
one case where those space-wasting braindead disclaimers have actually 
held up in court.  Until then, it seems they are little more than balm 
for paranoid PHBs that think dancing smilies and plastered GIFS in the 
background of emails is a good idea.

E) STOP STICKING DANCING SMILIES AND GIFS AND JPGS INTO YOUR MAILS. 
Newsflash.  Not all mail clients display them the same way.  Sometimes 
they just appear as useless attachments.  Sometimes they actually do 
appear in the background...guess what?  Your pretty green and red motif 
for fall colors in your text and background?  I'M RED GREEN COlORBLIND. 
  I can't read a damn word of your pretty rainbow crap unless I go 
through the trouble of editing it or highlighting it.  Whoops, I clicked 
delete instead.

F) Yes, word wrapping length annoys people.  Usually, I find, the crowds 
using older-style editors on the console are most vocal about this.  New 
idea.  We need an automated filter that will rewrap messages at a 
specified length.  This is one of the few things that don't really 
irritate me so much.  I do find that need to click "re-wrap" with 
thunderbird to quote messages back periodically, though, and I don't 
know what exactly makes the difference.  I don't particularly care at 
the moment.  I wish it would be fixed or that people would use the Apple 
Mail.App solution of the format that is dynamically resized for quoting 
based on your display size, so email is appropriately wrapped whether on 
my widescreen monitor, my laptop, or my cellphone.  Like most ideas I 
have regarding computers (or users) being less irritating, this is no 
doubt a pipe dream, as I know someone will have some personal quirk or 
justification why this is too irritating for them to adopt, usually 
related to EMACS not supporting it yet or Outlook can't use a publicly 
open format or it would require a user to think.

G) Is there a reason you need to email me in HTML?  Is it really wise, 
when Window uses the same engine for rendering HTML email as it uses for 
Explorer, with all it's wonderful security bugs and glitches, to treat 
my email client as a web browser?  Let's just skip the steps in between. 
  Start a blog and IM me the link to your latest entry that you want me 
to see.  Stick in dancing fairy gifs, goofy pictures, your latest and no 
doubt fake claims for commercial recipes or how some corporation is a 
front for an evil anti-(gay|tech|government|etc.) group...stick them 
into the web blog and let me know there's something there to waste my 
time when I have a spare half hour.  Better yet, I can reply with the 
snopes link in that one spot and you can preserve it for reference, 
rather than me taking the time to email you and have you delete it and 
repeat the same message to me three months later. Reserve email for 
actually just communicating to me in plain text with information I could 
use.

H) Don't bother with read receipt.  Use it inside your own organization 
if you find it necessary.  I freely admit that it would be handy at 
times for particular purposes.  Unfortunately for you, I set my client 
to ignore it.  If I could I'd strip it out entirely.  Why?  Because it's 
too easy for spammers to use it.  Duh.

I) DON'T HIJACK THREADS in LISTS! There's a reason you don't just "hit 
reply and change the subject to something totally freakin' unrelated to 
the original topic."  See, there are these things called headers.  One 
of the headers in mailing lists, more often than not, includes an ID so 
sane email programs can easily ID when a message belongs in a particular 
thread of conversation.  All you did was change the topic.  Believe me, 
plenty of list users absolutely love it when a thread about a memory 
leak in a recent update of the kernel suddenly becomes a thread about 
installing a messaging client.  Open a new message, insert the proper 
TO: address, and send your message.  List regulars, as well as the 
archivers, will thank you for it.

J) If you don't bother with a subject line so I can organize your 
messages or refer to them later, don't be surprised if I delete it 
automatically.  Sometimes it's an oversight.  Sometimes a mistake.  For 
most people, it's because they forget EMAIL IS NOT AIM.  If the message 
isn't important enough to have a simple summary line in the subject, 
it's probably not important enough for me to put in the priority list of 
things to get back to.

K) If you read this far, congratulations.  I have had plenty of educated 
people complain that a message is just too long and they just can't read 
that much.  I'll grant them that complaint to a point.  This does take 
time to read.  Believe it or not, I had something to say, and it took 
time to type out in a way that I hope is clear.  I'm not emailing this 
only because I love the click of my keyboard.  I'm trying to get you to 
possibly learn or consider a different viewpoint.  Read it.  Understand 
it.  Reply to it.  Don't delete it and later rehash what point I JUST 
BROUGHT UP because you were too lazy to read through this and apparently 
are only capable of reading in spoonfuls.  If we emailed you an IT tip 
or solution to your problem, we did it so you can refer to it, or review 
it at your own pace.  Don't call me about the same issue when the answer 
is right in the text. Don't ask me to email it out to you as five 
mini-mails.  If you don't want to read it in the first place, you'll no 
doubt delete it.  Don't expect me to spoon feed it to you again later. 
I'll just refer you back to this information.  That's part of the reason 
I typed it out.  I don't want to repeat myself unless there's a good 
reason for it.  Should I repeat myself again here?  Maybe reiterating it 
will drive the point home.

I'm not saying you personally do all of this, I'm just venting about 
email etiquette that drives me slowly, slowly, slowly nuts over time. 
People don't craft messages clearly anymore.  They slap out whatever 
thought is in their head, and claim they don't have the time to actually 
make something appear nice, or even readable.  I'm tired of it. 
Nowadays if my nerves are frayed enough I just delete messages that take 
more effort to decipher than I have patience for.

One last point...stop sending format-specific attachments that 
necessarily requires me to have a specific package to read it.  Hello? 
WORD?  Not everyone has Office.  I know, luddite my name is me.  I don't 
have the latest version of Word, neither do most of my users.  Send me 
the PDF if you want me to refer to information.  Send me RTF if I must 
edit it.  Don't send me DOCX until both MS Office and OpenOffice (and 
NeoOffice) support the format.  Get thy head extracted from thy 
hindquarters and learn what SAVE AS is useful for. It's not hard, takes 
only a few seconds, but saves SOOOO MUCH irritation for users on the 
other side that I guess are just not as privileged as you in the "I can 
afford the latest and greatest vendor crap" game.  It's not even that 
hard for the PDF part if you install something like PDFWriter.  I do 
wish I could find an open source PDF editor, though.  I'd LOVE to use 
that format since readers are so common out there and the formatting may 
actually get (mostly) preserved on different platforms.

Whew...suppose I should be donning my asbestos suit now.  This one may 
have just ticked off the self-appointment listmoms.  Or other people 
that don't have a problem with things that do irritate me.  Maybe I'm 
just quirky.  At this moment...*shrug* I don't really care.  I don't 
normally have a history of emailing messages to this group that are so 
long or so off-topic, so I beg some leeway, and probably won't do it 
again for quite some time unless provoked for some reason.  Maybe it'll 
touch a nerve for some people and maybe it'll reaffirm views other 
people hold and hey, now they're not alone.

Or I'll get kicked off the list.

Whoops.

'Scuse me.  Time to go jump back into the tech trenches.  Have a good 
day, and Ubuntu rocks...