Friday Morning Rant: Email Sins

Yesterday I wrote about the blizzard of unviewed email that was awaiting me after 12 days away from my laptop, and the subpar 'broadband' connections with which I attempted to process that email. Among the massive email ballast were dozens of messages containing multi-MByte file attachments; one dim bulb actually had the gall to (unsolicited) email me 20 MBytes' worth of TIFFs, and another PR dimwit emailed me a 2 MByte Microsoft Word-formatted press release….1.9 MBytes' worth comprising, as far as I can tell, the company's logo at the top of page one.

There was no way I was going to be able to pull down such stuff from Nepal without incurring server timeouts (trust me I tried, multiple times)….and a single bloated email clogging the POP3 server pipeline also prevented me from downloading other, svelter messages behind it. Fortunately I had a spare Gmail account available to which I could shunt the dross for access once I got back Stateside.

PLEASE, people, give it a rest. I know that the broadband adoption percentage is increasing, especially among the tech community. And I know how easy it is to forget, once you're broadband-enabled, how tedious it was to surf the 'Net in the POTS days. But as recent reports point out, we still have a long way to go before broadband is pervasive. Even if I'm DSL-tethered at the home office, I'm frequently traveling and sipping from the Internet through a much thinner cellular straw. And regardless of the bandwidth with which a user accesses the 'Net, there's also the issue of frequency-of-access to consider; multi-MByte payloads rapidly consume available POP3 server allocation, which isn't infinite even with Gmail.

Here's a few hints for your Friday morning consideration: instead of emailing file attachments, send me links to a HTTP or FTP server where you've loaded up the files, so I can download them when it's convenient. Don't embed bitmaps within a HTML-encoded message; if you must include pretty pictures, encode them instead as reference links to server-housed content. And whenever possible, dispense with fancy email formatting such as HTML and Rich Text. One company regularly sends me several-hundred-KByte text-only emails that, if encoded in ASCII, would be several orders of magnitude smaller in size. When a 4-times reply chain creates a 1 MByte email message comprised only of text, I call that unnecessary bloat. Especially when my version of Outlook freaks out after the database reaches 2 GBytes in size….

Thankyouverymuch. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming….