I’ve spent a fair bit of time on various mailing lists recently, mostly dealing with the development of new software and programming languages, and I’ve come across the most annoying thing ever.

[snip]

> Quoted section of previous e-mail

Quick comment on single aspect of previous e-mail which I've quoted above.

[snip]

We all get that you’re quoting him and that, because you’re quoting a small section of a larger e-mail, we may need to read more of the previous email to understand your comment in context, but that’s why any self-respecting email client supports threading of related e-mails, especially when under the purview of mailing lists.

If we really want to, all we have to do is scroll up a bit and we’ll get the previous posts in the thread. Also, if we’re reading a posting on a mailing list, I think it’s safe to assume that we’ve been reading along and are aware of the context of the discussion.

So please stop snipping. When there are more snips than there are useful contributions to the discussion, you have a problem.

Email is a great time saver not because you can read it faster than regular mail. It’s the delivery system stupid!

I’ve read from time to time that printing out emails defeats the purpose of email, but the purpose of email was never the ever-mythical paperless society. Email simply increases the transmission speed of your message. Before the advent of the high speed internet we enjoy today, there was something called a Sneakernet where instead of transferring data across painfully slow data lines, you’d take your high capacity data tapes and run them across campus.

These kinds of things are still in place, primarily because it’s cheaper and faster to transmit data in that way. Netflix ships you DVDs through mail; they could let you download them, but downloading 4.5 Gigs is untenable given the speeds our ISPs offer to us and the limitations on our bandwidth.

It just so happens that because of the small size of emails, and the high speeds (relative to size) available email is vastly more efficient than regular mail. Instead of taking a day — and that’s on a good day — to send five thousand words to someone, that same can be done in seconds through email. And it’s better that way; I don’t see many reasons not to replace regular mail (for correspondance, anyways) with email.

So why is printing email wrong? It’s not putting a damper on our paperless society because if anything, the advent of the technological age — and maybe guilt-curbing recycling as well — has led to more paper use and abuse. The answer, as you’ve most likely figured out from the title of this post, is that it’s not wrong: it’s just stupid.

There is something a little bit more than the delivery system. There’s also the thing you put it in. Organization is a huge factor in increasing efficiency, so keeping your emails in your computer neatly organized into folders and labelled with helpful identifiers is the best thing to do. Printing out your emails and going through them in that manner leads to flipping through pages trying to find related emails. Your computer can do that for you. Many email programs can now recognize message threads even when the threads aren’t propgated as a part of subsequent messages. Printing off emails negates that advantage.

There are countless reasons why you shouldn’t print off emails, and I don’t want to compile a list here whether it be comprehensive or not, but don’t confuse this with an implication of doing something wrong. Some people might be more sensitive to monitor refresh rates than others. They could be utterly computer illiterate, and unwilling to learn. They could be the owners of a paper company trying to artificially boost profits by buying large quatities of paper for their own offices. None of these are wrong per se — though they get increasingly sketchy as the list progresses — but they’re all stupid; don’t confuse the two.