Fred Lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> wrote:

Further observation suggests that this particular `worm' is growing only linearly rather than exponentially. However, the potential for exponential growth --- eg. where some mail-server replaces an unrecognised character code by two copies of the same --- remains when users attempt to employ rich codes, and might quickly bring down large parts of the list network, particularly if the bug lurks on the central list server.

[Two characters may not be a long string by itself; but after (say) 30 replies, a billion characters concealed beneath your top posting becomes bad news!]

The longest I've seen in the wild is the following: =C3=83=C2=83=C3=82=C2=83=C3=83=C2=82=C3=82=C2=A2=C3=83=C2=83=C3=82=C2=A2=C3=83=C2=82=C3=82=C2=82=C3=83=C2=82=C3=82=C2=AC=C3=83=C2=83=C3=82=C2=A2=C3=83=C2=82=C3=82=C2=84=C3=83=C2=82=C3=82=C2=A2 That started as a single character. Puzzles: What character? What are the transition rules? How many levels deep was it quoted? I haven't seen anything like that on this list. Instead, non-ASCII characters get turned into question marks. However, occasionally someone quotes, not just all of a message, but all of a multi-message digest. If the average digest contained more than one message that quotes all of a recent previous digest, then messages would indeed grow exponentially in size. This is not a new problem. The first email lists to be digestified were SF-Lovers and Human-Nets, 38 years ago. Within a month, the problem of people quoting whole previous digests when replying to one message was solved by placing a line in the header of the digest that nobody would be have a legitimate reason to quote, and rejecting any submission that contained that line. Perhaps our moderator could start doing that. By 37 years ago, text email was pretty well figured out. And it, along with other "netiquette," stayed figured out for more than a decade. Unfortunately, the net was then flooded with newbies who arrived more quickly than they could assimilate into Internet culture, and the result was chaos. (Look up "Eternal September.") The purpose of quoting is to establish context for your reply. A good rule of thumb is to never quote more than you would retype or paraphrase if the automatic quoting function was broken. Quoting all of a message is like soaking a textbook in highlighter ink. Especially if it's a very recent message, which everyone has recently read. Also, since in English we read top to bottom, your response should come after what you're quoting, not before it. It should seldom be necessary to quote more than two levels deep. And of course you should always use angle brackets to make it clear what is and isn't being quoted. I recently posted a denunciation of IQ. I argued that just because someone is very smart in one field doesn't mean they aren't much less smart in another. I was thinking of (among other things) this list at the time. To put it bluntly, there are lots of brilliant mathematicians here who are so bad at writing readable non-bloated emails that they may qualify as idiot savants (idiots savant?).