[TriLUG] [OT] E-mail privacy disclaimers

[Justis Peters]

Paul McLanahan wrote:
> I didn't check, but my guess is that I'm
> saving bandwidth, even after the addition of the lawyer-talk, just by
> switching to plaintext email. I know I'm at least saving over the
> people w/ graphics. If only I could block graphics coming from the
> exchange server all together.
>   
Paul,

If saving bandwidth is the concern, then this is hardly the right place
to focus. I suspect that, even in HTML format, the emails you produce in
one month barely compare to the traffic your web browser creates in a day.

The only reason that email even shows up in bandwidth measurements is
because of the massive numbers of spam emails and mailing list emails
that never get read. Large parts of it is just spam that gets denied by
the server. It never even reaches the inbox.

If you want to affect the bandwidth consumption of email over which you
have some influence, encourage your peers to use internal file shares
(or at least online "file drop" sites) instead of forwarding attachments
to each other. If you figure out how to have influence over spam, please
let me know.

If you really want to "save the bandwidth", put your weight behind
*useful* applications of peer-to-peer protocols, like bittorrent (for
distributing legal software) and Skype. Also, encourage the hoards of
people piling on the "social media" bandwagon to understand multicast
protocols, multi-site optimization, and caching.

Disclaimer: This email is only worth $0.02. If you think you have
received this opinion in error, please forget that you saw it and delete
it immediately.

Kind regards,
Justis