This week I've shot myself in the foot a few times. The first through firing
up my old Mac, trying it on a modem to my ISP, and accidentally sending off a
raft of messages that had been in store for at least six months, unnoticed.
One of these was CCd to the Link which may of confused you. The program just
dispatched them automatically without asking.
Then, a bit of banter meant exclusively for Robin, found its way into the copy
going to link group, and it appeared as if it were a personal attack. Sorry
for that, it was meant to be an Aussie-type put-down/pleasantry, only between
old friends.
I'm not the only one making these mistakes. In recent weeks, I've also seen a
couple of personal messages intended only for me appear on the link - due to
accidental carbon copying. And some stuff sent by me directly to one of the
link participants, was answered accidentlly on the link — which may have left
a few of you confused
While all of these incidents (and a few others over the last year) are due
fundamentally to carelessness — the fact is that we are all careless. And,
when we need to get through a hundred or so messages at a session as I often
do every morning, we are bound to make mistakes. This problem can only get worse.
I maintain that we aren't being helped by e-mail applications. And this is my
bitch here.
These haven't really changed much since I first began to use e-mail in the
'80s. However, with the Netscape source-code release news, maybe this is the
time to begin planning and designing upgrades to the e-mail applications (not
to the network itself) to help save us from our own folly.
For a start, I now have three different e-mail address files on different
machines, using different programs, that are either not-get-at-able, or
incompatible.
For God's sake, you'd think we would be able to translate or transmit a simple
address file between machines so that, when we update or change applications,
the address-book information comes across as well. I've only managed to do
this successfully once in the last decade.
Compared to word processors, e-mail applications are amazingly primitive.
For instance, why aren't all address-book directories using a hierarchical
file system which allows us to identify and isolate Usenet addresses, with the
participants of each Usenet in a sub-file. We also need public Usenet groups
to be distinct from Work group lists, Friends, etc. For some reason the
programmers have allowed me to store my received e-mail files in a directory
hierarchy, but not my addresses (maybe I need another upgrade!). Taken
overall, I've got a few hundred addresses I want to keep in some sort of
sensible multilevel flexible file structure with keyword selection, not just nicknames.
With such identification of Usenet addresses, the e-mail application could
then be made intelligent enough to distinguish between mail intended for
groups, and mail intended for individuals — and it could probably re-inforce
the distinction by displaying the text as you type (or just the address line)
in different colours. It might also have a toggle on the CC function, which
lets participants add extra personal comments or explanation to the basic
carbon copy when mailing both to an individual and a group.
I'd also like to use a more basic signature line with Usenet groups than I do
for normal mai. This should and could be added by the application
automatically if it knew which address belonged to Usenet group mailings.
It's often annoying to read short messages in a thread which are constantly
followed by thirty-odd lines of signature -- and tags which were fun the first
time you read them, but .... ?
And, isn't there something we can do about the automatic insertion of
paragraph codes at the end of each text line. Why the hell can't the display
application handle the line-breaks, and leave paragraph breaks to the end of a
paragraph, which is where God intended? This stuff is a totally unnecessary
hang-over from the first days of the IBM PC with its 40 fixed-size characters
across a page - and no one seems to fix it.
----
And maybe we could begin to use colour (or blinking!) to make it clear when a
paragraph is intended to be a joke. The old <grin> or smiley is always a bit
ponderous. But this would involve a new tranmission standard, while the
suggestions above are just application problems.
I'm now beginning to get a flood of e-mail in HTML form where colour is being
used for display rather than for identification. I'm afraid that this is going
to get out of hand: I don't really want all my e-mail looking like K-Tel junk
mail promotion brochures. Especially, since I use both a basic non-HTML reader
and Netscape Communicator on different machines.
But the incorporation of e-mail into browsers seems to be proceeding rapidly
without any text-identification/display application standards — or any ability
for the recipient to say "send me the text, and leave out the crap".
HTML will probably take over gradually. This is a pity, but maybe now is the
time to do something about it by improving the other standards. Netscape must
be keen to become the "people's network application" now, and perhaps they are
even more receptive to suggested changes from the grassroots level.
--
Stewart Fist - technical writer and columnist
See: http://www.australian.aust.com/computer/cmpcols.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/http/sfist/ (some archives)
http://www.electric-words.com (main archives)