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At some point hitherto, Adam Russell hath spake thusly:
> I don't know the answer to the question. If more than one person is
> bothered by the advertising the bigmailbox.com peple put at the
> bottom I guess I could use a different address. Although, yahoo,
> hotmail, and pretty much all other free webmail types do this I
> would go as far as to say that one would have to be pretty thin
> skinned and have a pretty boring life to have this bother them. 

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Often people make assumptions about what other's
situations are, based on their own (often limited) experience.  The
above strikes me as an example of that phenomenon.

Consider for a moment the content of this message to which I am
replying.  You wrote 6 lines of text, in response to 2 lines of text.
Yet the message was more like fifty lines long, filled mostly with
multiple appendages of e-mail ads.  The vast majority of your
message was bloat about which no one (other than the advertisers)
cares one iota.  It contained roughly 400% as much junk as actual
content.

Now, on a single message basis, this isn't a big deal.  However
consider that people who are on mailing lists get a lot of such mail.
And if they're on multiple mailing lists (which is fairly likely), the
amount of such mail is multiplied still.  Many of these people STILL
can't get better connections than 28.8kbps modems, and download their
mail via POP connection on that slow link.  Downloading their mail now
takes somewhere between 3 to 5 times longer than it should, because
people refuse to take an extra few seconds to trim their replies,
and/or use e-mail addresses that add a boatload of cruft to the end
of their messages.

To make matters worse, while it's no longer common around here, there
are still people who pay for their connection based on bandwidth
usage.  Downloading all this extra junk in e-mail COSTS THEM MONEY.
This is most common outside the U.S. these days, but is not unheard of
here, and also lists like this one often have subscribers from all
over the world.  It's counter-intuitive that a local LUG mailing list
would have such members, but often they do.  I'm not sure about BLU,
but I know for a fact that another local LUG list I'm on has people
from Texas and from farther west, and (though I don't know if this is
still true) have also had subscribers from Europe.

Leaving unnecessary cruft in e-mail also often makes it difficult for
the reader to find your message.  The bottom line is it's simply
inconsiderate, no matter how you slice it.  And given how often people
do complain about it on all sorts of mailing lists, I'd have to say it
does bother rather a lot of people.  You can make your own judgements
about how thin-skinned or boring they are...

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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