[TriLUG] Why the message size limit? [Was: Your message to TriLUG awaits moderator approval]

[Alan Porter via TriLUG]

Cristóbal's account is spot-on.

It's important to note that Kevin Hunter's very thorough analysis was
intended to empirically find the cutoff between "actual conversation"
and "poorly formatted email" (too much quoting, replying to digests,
"me too" posts, etc).  He slogged through years worth of TriLUG 
archives
to find the size point of diminishing quality returns.

The cut-off that he found and the limit he implemented had nothing to
do with storage being expensive/cheap, or with how some of our users
still use their Hayes 1200 baud modems, or how long it takes for a
message to load, or whether you use mutt or gmail.

It was 100% about quality of our mailing list to support discourse.

And yes, it would be great if we could add some logic to notice finer
points, like $sender==ajoyner or percentage of quoted content.  But
we're volunteers using the tools we have, and we're trying not to make
a career out of managing TriLUG email or writing custom email filter
programs.

If this topic really bugs you, then please volunteer to help make the
system better.  Email to "steering at trilug.org".


Alan Porter
steering committee member emeritus
part-time email janitor