Should I shut down this list?

[Andy Waddington - cave surveying mailbox]

Sometime before sending Graham Mullan <graham.mullan at coly.org.uk> typed
 (and on Fri, 29 Sep 2023 18:24:00 +0000 sent):

> having to update one's storage media every thirty years is probably OK.

Well, I never did manage to import all my email from the RISC OS era to more
modern email systems on Linux, so for stuff in the 1980's and early 1990's I
have to fire up my ancient (1987) RISC PC. At least that still was email, and
in theory I probably could import it - but since that machine only talks 10base2
ethernet, it wuld be a godawful faff. None of my PCs has a floppy drive...

> A further issue with the list ... is the automatic scrubbing of attachments.

Does trip me up from time to time, but mostly I take the attitude that if you have
some binary guff that you want to associate with an email message, then it is more
polite (since not everyone may wish to examine it) to put it on the web and just
post the URL. I've had this attitude since someone chose to send me one of their
holiday photos (a 3 Mb Windows bitmap) when email was by dial-up modem, and it
took a *long* time (for which I was paying phone charges, albeit a local call)
to arrive - much longer than it took to look at and delete. Bandwidth may be
cheaper now, but processing time for big mailboxes (and, as I say, mine go back
over two decades before I have to start poking about on old RISC OS machines
for ancient archives) is seriously increased by having big binary attachments
dotted about. Far better to download them at your own option and at a time to
suit your bandwidth usage, then store them somewhere more locatable than in an
ageing email thread. You can even make life easier for yourself by replying
to the email, but just sending the reply to yourself, saying where you put
the thing you downloaded.

> the thing is that Andy is just about the only person to use it properly

Yes, I do despair of top-posters - not only does it waste storage space and
bandwidth, but often you can't see which point a person is actually addressing
in a reply. Selective quoting makes threads vastly easier to follow. To be
fair, top-posting somehow became the default behaviour for email clients ages
ago (as always, I blame Microsoft as the great evildoer), and most people were
never exposed to the "proper" way of doing things... But, again, it is just 
ommon courtesy not to waste other people's resources. .sigs considered evil,
too, especially in a top-posting context where you end up with loads of
copies :-(

> Yes it is a marked improvement on parchment, quill and ...

But my archive of stuff on paper (in a family history context) goes back to 1731.
The main disadvantage is that backups are harder (which is why I have an A3 scanner).

Andy