A rant to close out the week.
I received an email message today. The message itself contained 194 bytes of text data which explained what was in the accompanying attachment. The attachment was a Microsoft Word document that contained 285 bytes of text. No fancy formatting, no images … just text. The entire message could have, therefore, easily been conveyed in under 500 bytes.
The Word document, however, was 20,480 bytes!! The entire message, therefore, was 51 TIMES the size it needed to be in order to convey the exact same message in plain text.
The message was sent to four people, plus a copy was presumably saved in the sender’s Out box. That makes for a grand total of 102,400 bytes of data sitting on our mail server for something that could have been transmitted using less than 2,500 bytes.
This is not to mention the fact that viruses can ride in on email attachments, that it takes extra time to open email attachments, that some people not want/be able to use Word, etc.
Now, this is a small potatoes example, but this kind of thing goes on ALL THE FRIGGIN’ TIME around here. Every meeting agenda with 6 single line agenda items is sent in a Word document with a letterhead graphic. Meeting minutes, which are just plain text, are put into Word. I recently received the membership list of a committee that was in Microsoft friggin’ Excel! Ten names in Column A, cells 1-10. No phone numbers, no email addresses, nothing that even approached requiring a tabular format let alone any complex calculations and formulas (which is what a spreadsheet is FOR, people!)
Given the fact that no one ever deletes any of their email, it’s no wonder our file backup process is now taking over 8 hours.
People (and this includes everyone): stop with the attachments already. Plain text is Just Fine for conveying 95% of the information you are sending via email.
Comments
Loud and clear, Major Steel. My peeve is people who send gigantic photos straight from their digital camera that they don't bother to compress or resize. Not just one photo will suffice for these nimrods; they have to send a half dozen or more! WHAAAH!!
It never ceases to amaze me that so many people don't take the time to learn how the Internet works. Nor do they learn how they can use software (that oftentimes is inexpensive or even free) to assist them in saving bandwidth. The situation gets worse the more people move over to broadband access. "It uploads and downloads really fast! What's the problem?" Ahem...I'm still on dialup. Hello! *sigh*
Posted by: arrmac | June 10, 2006 9:36 AM