Text 1743, 92 rader
Skriven 2007-04-11 18:02:18 av Ardith Hinton (1:153/716.0)
   Kommentar till text 1733 av Alexander Koryagin (SashaKo)
Ärende: Mechanics...  2.
========================
Hi again, Alexander!  This is a continuation of my previous message to you:

AH>  Fidonet mail often travels through many different
AH>  systems on its way from the sender to the recipient.
AH>  Sometimes a message which is too long for a particular
AH>  system to handle may be lost or truncated.

AK>  May be it was at the dawn of Fidonet?


          It happened to me twice during the 1990's... once in netmail, once in
echomail.  That's how I learned where the limits were.  But the situation isn't
as different nowadays as one might imagine.  We have computers which can handle
longer messages.  At the same time, we're also gating stuff from other networks
which typically arrives with an amazing number of kludge lines.  Before I could
start reading a recent example I had to use the "Page Down" key twice....  :-))



AK>  Now imho all the Fidonet traffic are being tranfered
                                      | is being transferred

AK>  via Internet.


          Much of it, but not all!  Dallas still has some BBS users who call on
a POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) line & occasionally type replies online.  I
also know a few folks who still use the same DOS machine to handle Fidonet mail
that they've been using for umpteen years, because it's stable & it works.  I'm
not a techie myself... but I think I understand where they're coming from.  :-)



AH>  I've found a maximum of ninety-five lines from the
AH>  salutation to the closing a useful rule of thumb.
AH>  Other folks, using different software, may prefer
AH>  to have their messages subdivided automatically as
AH>  necessary.


AK>  If somebody wants to do such a thing of course

AK>  I am not against. I just asked.
     | I am not against it.


          Okay....  :-)



AH>  As a conversation develops, the replies tend to get
AH>  longer & longer.

AK>  Both participants have to fight so that the length of
AK>  a letter will be less than 10 kb.


          Maybe, if both participants find long messages difficult to read.  As
far as the computer is concerned, though, you can probably double that....  :-)



AK>  The letters longer than that are too tiresome in
AK>  reading and answering; nobody reads them.


          I do... that's how I know messages are still truncated nowadays.  The
vast majority are articles somebody has copied from a newspaper or whatever.  I
haven't seen any personal messages truncated recently, I suppose because people
are more aware of the overall length when they've done more of the typing.  ;-)



AH>  Another way to keep the length down, though, is to quote
AH>  sparingly.  A bit of judicious pruning can work wonders
AH>  in some cases....  ;-)

AK>  Such a pruning is very useful thing. You choose only the
AK>  most important quotations, you learn how to say shorter,
AK>  how repeat the essence in few words.  Eventually a pruning
AK>  makes the tread readable for others.


          Uh-huh.  Originally we pruned quotes as a courtesy to SysOps who were
relaying our mail from one place to another at their own expense.  I think it's
a tradition worth keeping, though, if it results in better readability....  :-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
 * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)