Whether we like it or not technology moves ahead. Thus the internet,
which a decade ago used to be exclusively text-based and with hardly
any advertising, now offers abundant grafics and commerical
advertisements. Similarly, e-mail, had been moving in that direction
as well, with HTML-formatted messages, electronic business card and
other attachments, etc. One can argue that much of that is not
absolutely necessary, but it is here. And sometimes attachments can be
quite useful, in separating data or detailed information from the key
points made in the e-mail message itself. Those of us who have slow
dial-up connections (thanks to my local phone company, which has
changed its name four times over the past six years, my dial-up
connection speeds almost never exceed 26 kbs - I guess being 40 miles
from Boston we are not considered worthy of service updating) have a
couple of options rather than wait for ever to download a message with
a huge file attached: One is to direct the e-mail program we are using
not to download any message larger than, say, 40 kB (a verbose text
e-mail might run between 5-10 kB, so 40 Kb should screen out any large
attachments without causing one to miss messages without attachments).
This way one can decide, based on the subject, the sender's ID, and the
portion of the message up to 40 KB that came through, whether it's
worth downloading the rest. Another option is to sign up for one of
the many web-based free e-mail accounts. The advantage of having such
an account is that one can see the list of the messages, including
subject, sender, and the size of any attached files, before having to
download any of them. We may not be able to push back progress, but we
can make some smart uses of it.
Ioannis Papayanopoulos
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products.
http://shopping.yahoo.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Dec 08 2000 - 10:44:37 EST