Regarding the issue of cumulative postings to ADSM-L:

Martha requested that reiteration of the entire thread of a discussion within
a reply be avoided if possible.  In doing so, Martha is requesting that people
make intelligent use of resources: electronic and, more importantly, human.
Regurgitation of the whole discussion each time is a waste of space on her
system, on your system, and on the network.  Too often we see everything the
responder has received, including mail headers and MIME attachments.  It's
mostly clutter, and makes recipients want to discard the mail more than read
it.  It becomes value subtracted rather than added.

The even more important issue is the waste of people's time, which is very
expensive and finite.  A posting will often consist of a problem statement
plus examples of the problem, which takes perhaps a couple of minutes to
absorb.  All of us have read it already, and so a succinct description in a
contemporary reply posting is of far more value in quick identification of the
topic than in attaching all the original material and making the recipient
plow through it.  A posting which starts out with:
 "Regarding the issue of long file names on brandX operating system:"
meets with considerably more appreciation because the author respects the time
of the thousand recipients and has simply summarized the topic.  This
streamlines the process.

If you need to review a discussion, remember that Marist has invested a lot of
work to make this data conveniently available to you.  It can be readily
browsed at   http://vm.marist.edu:80/htbin/wlvindex?ADSM-L
Don't waste your own time categorizing and storing the ADSM-L mail that you
receive on your system - it's all conveniently available there.  What we
should do as contributors is adhere to an identifying Subject line such that
the thread is readily found in the archives, for current and historic research.

    Richard Sims, Boston University OIT