Forum Archive Index - December 1999

["Ben Dutton" <bendutton@sharechat.co.nz>]

Hi Snoopy,

I've had a talk to Will and would like to add the following comments to my
previous posting.

>  Surely you should be sending your e-mail news as text only?    Only
> yesterday you unsubscribed someone for sending bounce messags and
> cluttering up this forum.   Yet you are now proposing to waste
No, not at all, we unsubscribed him because his mail server was sending
bounces to us, _not_ to the forum.  Nothing to do with cluttering up the
forum, they were cluttering up Will's personal mailbox with error messages
reporting the problem, until he temporarily unsubscribed that email address.
> bandwidth on 'pretty' text which seems to me to be a far worse sin.
>  If you want'pretty' just post a web reference for the  subscribers.
We've been looking at the email clients that people use, and we've found, as
all sources agree, that a large majority of our users have email clients
that support HTML.  Our first priority is to try and make ShareChat as easy
and pleasant to use as possible, and HTML gives us flexibility and ease of
use that we simply wouldn't otherwise have.

> But to push feed the group a diet of HTML is IMHO just not on.   We
> all pay for each download we make (if not on a time basis directly,
> then indirectly through reduced bandwidth and increased connect
> times) and your proposal offers a 300% increase in overhead for
> almost no gain in quality.
Will tells me that it infact decreases the bandwidth used (for his full
explanation see [1] below).

As one of the other posters said, the download time for email is typically
much shorter than over the web.  Our new service gives our users what they
want faster and with more convenience, and that's what matters to us. Faster
also means cheaper, as you point out.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Benjamin Dutton
Managing Director
ShareChat Limited

[1] When the email news is mailed to a number of subscribers, a large number
of whom will use one of only several ISP's, the transfer from our ShareChat
box to each ISP's mail servers happens once.  However, when a number of
people view the page over the web, it is transferred once per view, which
wastes much more bandwidth.  If everyone used http proxy servers, this
wouldn't happen (it would then be almost as efficient as mailing it out),
but our experience has shown that the majority unfortunately don't.  To
summarise, I'm not sure where you got your 300% increase in overhead figure
from, as it is incorrect.



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