(All right then, scroll down for content :-)) On 1/4/07, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com <Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com> wrote:
For those of us who read nanog from a mobile device, it's incredibly annoying to have no content in the first few bytes - a lot of mobile e-mail clients (all MS Windows Mobile 5 devices and every Blackberry I've seen) pull the first 0.5KB of each message, i.e. the header, subject line and the first few lines of text, so the user can decide which ones are worth reading in full.
Why should all 1 billion Internet users change their behavior just because your minority mail-reading system is broken?
Hint: Procmail is your friend. Set up your own mail server and run procmail against all incoming email with newline-greaterthan in the first 500 bytes. You can preprocess these messages to do something like strip headers that you don't read and copy the first few reply lines to be first in the message. That way your mobile device will get more bang for the buck than most other people's.
Paul Vixie's colo registry may be of help if you need to find a place to stick your own mail server http://www.vix.com/personalcolo/
--Michael Dillon
Minority? A mail client has been standard-ish for the last three to four years of upgrade iterations. There are a LOT of mobiles out there. Granted not many of them are used for e-mail, but that is a percentage that is only going to go up. Anyway, I wouldn't write a letter with nothing worth reading on the first page. I don't write articles with nothing in the first paragraph. Why should over a billion users of the English language, etc, etc..