Email Etiquette
I wrote this response to my school’s general interest discussion list, following a controversial discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where someone posted an email including several large image files to make their point.
From: Adam Kessel
To: …
Subject: A technical suggestion
Not to add fuel to the fire, but I would like to interject a technical suggestion:
Enclosing large unsolicited attachments is bad netiquette (see, e.g., http://www.georgedillon.com/web/netiquette.shtml #3, Action #1: “Never send large unsolicited attachments”.) [Note: this page seems to be unreliable, here is a local copy.] Students who receive their email on their NUSL accounts or from free email services such as Yahoo! have limited mailbox space, and Jeremy’s 1M attachment could conceivably block other messages from getting through. There have been cases of people actually losing job offers when the offer, sent by email, bounced because the recipient’s mailbox was full, and the employer went on to the next candidate.
A much better approach would be to post links to the images you want people to see. It’s almost certain that all of the images that were enclosed in the message are already available online. Rather than duplicate the 1M of images 1000 times in the mailbox of each and every member of the law school community (taking up 1000M or 1 gigabyte of space), you could simply post links to the images. Also consider that many people download their email over a slow modem connection, and this one message could easily take 10-15 minutes to download. For some this will also mean a higher phone bill.
If the images aren’t already online, there are plenty of free sites that will host your images, and then you can provide links to these. Just search google for “free image hosting”.
We should all support a right to free expression and debate on important issues in this community. Our message is likely to be taken more seriously, however, if it is done with respect for the resource impact of our mode of communication.
—Adam