Housekeeping: About long posts

Hi, all. A long, housekeeping message here.

Some of you are affected by this, some not. To be on the safe
side, please read carefully, in the event that it pertains to
you. I'm sorry it is long, but I want to cover all the relevant
angles. If you have questions, it would be best to read this
carefully, first; if you still have questions, reply to me
directly rather than to the list.

THE PROBLEM:

Lately, many messages -- more than the normal volume -- have
bounced to me (as list owner), because the list could not
deliver them. Therefore, as your trusty caretaker, I want to
comment about delivery failures.

The biggest trouble lately has been messages that are too large
for the list software. Anything over 30,000 characters (about
15 typed manuscript pages!) gets automatically rejected to me by
the list software; I have no control over the maximum size.

We have had a few of these large messages recently. So, my
first request is for you to keep the size of your messages as
small as possible. That is actually easy to do, since in most
cases, oversize messages are large because of reasons under the
control of the sender. (Continue reading to learn about that.)

In addition, a growing number of subscribers have had their
delivery fail because their mailboxes were nearly full, and
those needlessly large messages from the list would have pushed
their boxes over the limit, and so were rejected.

What to do, then?

THE GOLDEN RULE

You know: Do unto others what you would have them do to you.

Please be bold about trimming contents to which you are
replying, especially if the old text is irrelevant to your
reply. Especially avoid writing some short message like:

        Me too! Anyone else feel like this?

... and then leaving some entire message to which you are
answering in the body of your reply below what you have written.
It's good manners to cut out the old stuff, if it doesn't have
any bearing on what you are saying. If you quote from some old
message, only quote the explicitly relevant parts, and cut out
the rest. It will make your messages manageably small.

KNOW YOUR MAIL PROGRAM

Some people use mail software that either generates HTML
(web-like) mail or, worse, mail that is first plain text, which
is then followed by THE IDENTICAL MESSAGE in HTML format,
causing a post to be more than twice as large as it needs to be,
and creating chaos for some who use traditional mailers that
don't handle HTML well as email.

Please check your preferences, and, at least when you send mail
to bananafish, TURN OFF anything like these features: rich
formatting; HTML formatting; styled text; or anything else your
mailer offers in the realm of fancy formatting. Keep in mind
that mail is historically a generic, plain-text medium, capable
of being read by virtually any computer with email software. To
be friendly to your fellow fish, please send plain text. It's
smaller, it's readable by anybody, and it keeps the volume of
traffic more manageable.

(For what it's worth, it appears that one of the worst offenders
is Microsoft Outlook and/or Outlook Express; I'm not entirely
sure if it's either program or both, since I use neither; but if
you use one of them, please peruse your settings and see if you
can set yourself for plain text -- at least when mailing to
"bananafish.")

Many subscribers have strict limits on the amount of mail an
account can hold. When you send a needlessly large message to
the list, some people cannot read it at all.

In addition, when you leave in all that extraneous material,
there's a good chance that your own words will be missed amidst
all the extra irrelevant text you left behind. So, please: when
replying, be ruthless in chopping out the parts of the old
message when those parts are not directly relevant to the reply
you are writing. It streamlines business for everyone, and it
increases the odds that people will actually read what you have
written. Some posts have a snippet of new material at top and
leave ALL the previously posted text trailing behind. Please
take a moment and delete such material before sending your
message.

(If you force people to wade through a morass of old posts and
pieces of previous messages that have little or no bearing on
the subject under discussion, there is the risk that readers
will either skip your message entirely rather than wade through
its complexity, or will read it and find it needlessly
confusing.)

COMPUTER VIRUSES

On another topic: There are plenty of nasty mail-based viruses
floating around, and we have been lucky that an infected message
has never made it to the list (several have come through, but
have bounced to me because they were too big for the software,
and my hyper-paranoid system catches the infection, and I notify
the unfortunate sender).

For your sake and that of everyone else here, please make sure
you have anti-virus software installed on your computer, and
that you use the "update" feature to keep its definitions
current. (These programs are usually updated once or twice a
month -- so check regularly, or, better yet, set the software to
check automatically every week.)

Finally, at least one subscriber who works for a governmental
office is in the unfortunate position of having mail scanned for
words or phrases the agency deems unacceptable. It might be
because of words on a hotlist that trigger the filter software,
or it may be conceptual phrases. I don't know; the software on
his end doesn't tell me why messages bounce. So, be on guard
that you may not be receiving all your mails if mail service is
acting like your nanny. I can do nothing to assist there.

If you think you are missing messages because of this, all I can
suggest is that you get an account outside work for bananafish
messages. As we all probably know (especially here in the land
of the free), employers in many places are legally permitted to
read, monitor, and fiddle with your mail when you use
work-related mail delivery systems or workstations -- so be
forewarned that if you subscribe to "bananafish" through work,
you may find yourself in difficult straits if your employer
objects to your receiving personal or recreational mail at the
office, during work hours. Some places are more liberal than
others, so know your local policies. Unfortunately, due to the
huge complexity of these matters, it is impossible for me to say
anything that might be applicable to your situation. You need
to learn about your work environment and then deduce what
applies to you.

Finally, on an unrelated note, I'm catching up on a huge backlog
and hope to get the list archive on the web site updated. It
has fallen far behind, but I believe I can catch up in the next
few weeks.

Now back to your regularly scheduled bloodbath.

Cheers,

--tim o'connor
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Received on Sun Aug 10 18:18:29 2003