An excerpt from http://www.team.net/posting.html:
You didn't edit your reply.
The problem, often referred to as TOFU, is a waste of limited
resources. The acronym comes from German, basically meaning original
on top, full reply under, but even with three years of German in high
school I can't remember the exact phrase.
When replying to a message, a fair number of mail programs stupidly
include the entire original automatically as part of the reply. And
most folks are quite happy to let it be so, rather than just quoting
the relevant sentence or two in their reply. So instead of a simple,
straightforward response like this:
From: aware@smart.host
To: list@server.net
Subject: Re: What color is your car?
Mine is red
We see things like
From: klooless@diploma.mill.edu
To: list@server.net
Subject: Re: What color is your car?
Mine is red
>>>>> Mine is yellow
>>>>> blah blah blah
>>>> Mine is black
>>>> blah blah blah
>>> Mine is green
>>> blah blah blah
>> Mine is orange
>> blah blah blah
> Mine is blue
> blah blah blah
A ton of stuff that has no need to be in the reply is included, simply
because the responder has no idea how to work their email.
The "death trailer" was added to most of the autox.team.net lists due
to the fact that some lists had over 80% of the bits they were pushing
along the wire being stuff people had already seen, and had no need to
see again. The analogy I used was it was like buying a 6 pack of your
favorite beverage, and getting one can of fresh, 5 cans of, uh, used
beverage. So some simple filters were put in place to reduce the waste.
There are lots of lists, and about 4 to 5 millions messages go out
every month to around 15,000 addresses all over the world. All that
useless quoting really adds up in congestion on the network line in and
out of the server, archive sizes being much larger than they need to be,
the indexing prgrams for the searchable web search having to do a lot
extra work both in the initial indexing of repetitive paragraphs and
performing searches for the user. I mean, how useful is it to return
the default limit of 50 matches if 49 of them are the same paragraph?
There is no real reason to include the complete text below one's
message. Quite often the subject line alone is sufficient context,
sometimes you may need to include a sentence or two to provide proper
references to your reply. I really doubt there are cases where one
needs to include full headers, signatures, and complete texts of the
original in replies.
Even with the death trailer, you still get people who for some reason
think that 'Edit your replies' means "send as much extra useless stuff
as you wish to bog down the server, the network and overfill peoples'
mailboxes so mjb has more admin work to do and just take out the few
added lines."
If for some reason you are using Microsoft's Virus Spreading Wizard,
aka Outlook, in the Tools -> Options menu you can change the setting
to NOT include the entire orginal message in your reply. Other mail
programs should have similar settings, check your documentation.
I know you can't legislate common sense and the courtesy to show some
respect for the thousands of other subscribers on the many team.net
lists, but being an optimist at heart, I try anyway.
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