ATTN SELF-STYLED LIST POLICE (was RE: Mr. Day)

[A. Rick Anderson]

James Wilkinson wrote:

>MJang wrote:
>  
>
>>This sort of begs the question - of the people who use text email
>>readers, how many are older, more experienced Linux users? (in other
>>words, if the rest of us bent a bit to accommodate them, perhaps they
>>would be more motivated to provide better answers). It sounds like at
>>least a few are stuck with text email readers on their systems.
>>    
>>
>
>Well, I've got Maildir folders, so this sort of question isn't too
>difficult to answer. The November statistics showed versions of Mutt and
>Pine being used: these were the only text-mode mailers in the top 25.
>
>ls | xargs egrep '^From: .*@redhat\.com' | grep -v fedora-list-bounces | wc -l
>
>gives 119 messages.
>
>ls | xargs egrep '^From: .*@redhat\.com' | grep -v fedora-list-bounces | cut -d: -f1-2 | xargs grep 'User-Agent: Mutt' | wc -l
>
>gives 74 messages. 
>
>So about three-fifths of responses from Red Hat employees are sent using
>Mutt.
>
I am generally a fairly libertarian type of guy, so I figured that 
maybe, just maybe, with a bunch of computer *scientists* and hackers, 
that real live numbers might be worth keeping in mind, just to keep a 
reality check on the "discussion".

I received over 116 messages on this list since I went to bed last 
night.  You are reporting that, in the entire month of November, Red Hat 
employees total number of responses was *119*, with a grand total of 
*74* coming from text only mailers.  So, if we project out over the 
month of November, that is roughly 200 messages a day * 30 days .... 
That would be 74 messages out of 6,000.  In other words 1%.  For the 
sake of debate, let's assume that every response from a Red Hat employee 
is worth 10 times that of every other responder on the list. 

Wow, that gets us all the way up to 10%.

How about other perspective.  Bandwidth and disk space.  Let's see.  The 
entire archive for November was 14 MBytes.  Let's assume half of that 
was due to HTML messages.  7 MBytes / month.  Oh my goodness!  That is 
almost as much 1/3 of the Swedish i18n of KDE.  Geez, this suggests that 
one person, updating once a month, consumes 10 times more bandwidth and 
disk space then this entire mailing list combined.

-- 
A. Rick Anderson


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