Here's a reiteration of guidelines for my students:

Please DO NOT...

• ...send me e-mailed attachments
• ...send me HTMLised e-mail
• ...cut'n'paste Word's text into an e-mail
• ...send me massive files

Case in point: a student sends me a Word document - cut'n'pasted into the e-mail it transpires - as his submisison for CAD Exercise #02. Microsoft Outlook Hopeless is used to e-mail it. It doesn't get delivered as an attachment but gets split by my e-mail client - Eudora - into two separate e-mails; each being about 150K in size. Consequently it's all but unreadable as delivered. I take time to stitch it back together so I can read it in a browser. It comes out at about 3 pages in length if you compensate for the crappy layout and abundance of whitespace.

Here are some interesting stats:

The pasted (HTMLised) text of the document is:

• 292949 characters
• 47745 words
• 2945 lines

The actual text of the document is:

• 8237 characters
• 1454 words
• ~200 lines

Bloat ratios:

• html:text characters 36:1
• html:text words 33:1
• html:text lines 15:1

To give you an idea of why the bloat ratios are so high here's a representative sample of how the text "addi $sp,$sp, " and some blank lines (~20 characters in total) are encoded (bloated by almost exactly 33:1):

<P class=MsoNormal><B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><o:p> </o:p></B></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><o:p> </o:p></B></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN-LEFT: 0.5in"><B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">addi $sp,$sp, <o:p></o:p></B></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><o:p> </o:p></B></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><o:p> </o:p></B></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><o:p> </o:p></B></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN-LEFT: 0.5in"><B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><o:p> </o:p></B></P>

Yet Another Reason Why I Hate Microsoft (YARWIHM)

I'd much rather receive e-mails that are about 8K in size rather than 286K thank you very much!!

So, please DO NOT...

• ...send me e-mailed attachments
• ...send me HTMLised e-mail
• ...cut'n'paste Word's text into an e-mail
• ...send me massive files