5 Nov
2019
5 Nov
'19
3:47 p.m.
On 5 Nov 2019, at 15:13, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 05, 2019 at 03:02:39PM +0000, Chris Smith wrote:
Ha! What a brilliant example. I only wish it was deliberate. Yes, I did intend to reply
to the list, and I’ve corrected that now so that everyone else can have a quick giggle at
my expense.
I’m also a mild -1 for much the same reasons
already mentioned, but out of interest do you know why it doesn’t work great for those
people? I can understand that people might think a mailing list a bit old fashioned, but
I’m a bit baffled at how someone could try to use one and fail in the attempt.
Well, did you intend to send this to me alone? If not, that's one
example of how someone can fail. Perhaps you did intend to send it
only to me, but 4 different people this past week have done that and
did not intend to send it just to me, so that's one thing. Most of the replies I see on the list are more like
forum responses
not emails. I find them hard to read as emails. The top posting,
terribly broken quoting. I'm seeing less and less point in expecting
clear emails from people who don't see value in sending clear emails.
I’m with you on that. My mail client has no option to turn off top posting so I have to
go to the effort of formatting manually, and I only go to that effort for technical
mailing lists because those are the only people who care.
I have used email since 1994, and FidoNet for a couple
of years
prior to that. But I wonder how far the tide is turning.
Sadly I think the only thing keeping email alive is the fact that almost every non-email
platform requires an email address for user identification and authentication. There’s a
big shift now for linking to Facebook and Google etc. for doing that, but those are
obviously very specific and platform dependent mechanisms, and even those require an email
address. Sooner or later there will be a common, platform-agnostic mechanism that will
become dominant, and at that point I suspect email die.
Chris
—
Chris Smith <space.dandy(a)icloud.com>