E-mail observation
I just made an observation how development of online applications and the wide use of fast internet services has made some attributes of an e-mail obsolete.
Gmail doesn’t have it visible anymore, but most desktop applications do - do you know what attribute of an e-mail message I’m talking about?
Size.
On desktop computers, it’s become obsolete - in mobile devices it still matters. For a while. When certain metrics are becoming diminishingly unnecessary, you should consider them as unnecessary to begin with. Measuring them is of no value to the end user and therefore you shouldn’t harass the user with the information.
Obsolete? I wish. At work, our company policy dictates that our Inbox (incl. Calendar) must be kept under 100MB, otherwise it just won’t work. So it doesn’t help that technology allows something if ones IT department doesn’t ;)
In private e-mails it most often doesn’t matter, but even GMail still has a paltry 20MB-or-something-limit. That’s enough for only one photo (in RAW).
Oh how I long for the days in mid-1990s when one could e-mail a 600MB CD-image without any limitations or problems. (So what if doing that crashed a couple of e-mail servers along the route, *ahem*…)
Well, I was probably talking for the majority of us (who aren’t moving large files all that much) :) In the consumer market it doesn’t matter that much nowadays, but in business for sure.
I’ve also found other services very viable in transferring large files so e-mail isn’t the solution for me in those cases.