I suspect that many if not most of you folks came to email in the mid to late 90s, when POP clients and MIME messages began to enjoy widespread use. If you're reading this, and your other mail, using Outlook or Eudora or some web client (Netscape Mail), you probably don't even see the amount of clutter in the messages with the HTML.

For those of us who came along well before the dawn of the public Internet, there's a wasteful, decidedly (US) American sensibility to these messages. US culture quite happily goes about its business, loading any activity with as much as the medium will bear, much to the detriment of the environment. I see messages with HTML in them as being in the same mode.

I've recently been invited to perform in public, and have gone looking for an amplifier. What I need is a mono combo amp, of about 100 watts of power, with an XLR (unbalanced audio) connector, and some EQ with echo or reverb. To get all those things, I have to buy a stereo guitar amp, which has a whole other side of stuff I don't need and really would prefer not to carry around (not to mention doubling the cost of the amp). Email messages with html or appended previous messages are like those amps. Lots of extra stuff and nothing but useless weight and cost added as a result.

I have asked folks to learn to configure their clients so that they don't send these kinds of messages, and gotten little cooperation. I suspect that many, if not most of them, don't even realize that their outgoing messages are full of html markup code, or have embedded, cascading messages appended below.

Given my lack of success, I'm embarking on a crusade. If you send a message to the list that's HTML or HTML and text, expect to get it back with a request to remove the html. If you send a message to the list with a number of previous messages appended, or even one message appended (a default append, where there is no commentary *INSIDE* the appended text), expect to get it back with a request to change the configuration of your mail program. If you don't know how to change the config of the program, I will help you.

The main reason I'm doing this is that such mail is wasteful, both of bandwitdh and disk, and of the time of others on the list who have to wade through the additional, useless text, to get to the real content. This is particularly true of the people who get the list in digest form, where the html never gets processed.

That these defaults offend my aesthetic sensibilities only makes the crusade more sweet.

This is, after all, a list dedicated to the shakuhachi, an instrument of simple sound, where the emphasis is on the sound and it's relationship to the world. Let's see if we can mimic that simple goal in the rest of our lives, starting here.

bj