In message <sokpoq$ojr$1@dont-email.me>, at 11:47:52 on Mon, 6 Dec 2021,
Bob <email@domain.com> remarked:
>On 2021-12-04 04:35:24 +0000, Anna Noyd-Dryver said:
>
>> Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:

>>>> Why can't your phone access the same email accounts as your
>>>>desktop?
>>> Because the majority of my email is held on POP3 accounts that the
>>> client can't access, nor would I want it to. It would be overwhelmed.
>>>
>> Can't you have an email client on your phone to access the one one
>>specific POP3 account which you tickets get delivered to?
>
>The problem with POP3 is that it is designed around the idea that when
>an email client downloads a message, it is no longer available on the
>server.

I wasn't attempting to contrast POP3 with IMAP, rather with webmail. But
in any event, POP3 has a "keep on server" option.

>This made sense when a person would access their email account from
>exactly one computer, and when 1 MB was big, and server-side storage
>limits caused problems.

Ironically, when I was collecting email on the train back in the day,
using 2.5G, I had a filter set up in the client to only download "small"
emails (aka ones without attachments). The way that worked was because
the server I was connecting to put the number of lines in the email into
the header, and the client would read the headers of all the newly
arrived emails, and then make a decision which to download (and only
mark as "read" the ones fully downloaded).

It was easy to carve a regular expression to look at that header entry
and automatically skip any email with three or more digits in the
line-count. Because any email with 100+ lines was almost certainly
encumbered with an attachment.

However, that solution, if still in place today, would mean that tickets
delivered by PDF would be a non-starter.

>In the modern era where 1 GB is not big anymore, having all of your
>mail stored server side is not a problem, and most people have multiple
>devices they want to access their email on. The solution to this
>problem is IMAP, but for some reason Roland does not wish to use this
>widely available solution, and would rather complain about the problem.

As I've posted in several replies today, the issue isn't with IMAP, it's
with the sorting and storing of thousands of emails on a phone (however
it was they arrived there).

In other news, travelling home from Lincoln to Peterborough the other
evening, and it being dark outside, I tried to use my phone to pass the
time. For more than half the trip there was no usable mobile signal. So
much for 20yrs of progress.
--
Roland Perry

On 06/12/2021 11:43, Roland Perry wrote:
> In message <sodpeh$d1s$2@dont-email.me>, at 18:59:29 on Fri, 3 Dec 2021,
> Graeme Wall <rail@greywall.demon.co.uk> remarked:
>
>>>  I have an opposite "Only in…" problem, in that I don't have a
>>> working  printer.
>
>>> I've survived without one for over two years now (asking a
>>> neighbour or using a local print shop on the few occasions I needed to
>>> print something). For much of the previous decade or so, my printer's
>>> ink
>>> cartridges had dried out every time I needed to use it. PDF-on-phone or
>>> ticket-in-app is *so* much more convenient for me than print-at-home!
>>
>> I switched to a laser printer, that solved the dried ink problem and
>> it's up and running within seconds of me wanting it rather than
>> waiting for the head clean and reset.
>
> I switched to an inkjet printer which does a periodic automatic
> head-clean, although I use it almost daily anyway.
Good choice if you use it regularly, I need to print things abut once a
month, mainly forms I have to sign, scan and return. Makes a laser a
no-brainer.

--
Graeme Wall
This account not read.

On 06/12/2021 07:31, Roland Perry wrote:
> In message <sofqsp$8cv$1@dont-email.me>, at 13:36:25 on Sat, 4 Dec 2021,
> Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>> Sam Wilson <ukr@dummy.wislons.fastmail.co.uk> wrote:
>>> <martin.coffee@round-midnight.org.uk> wrote:
>>>> On 03/12/2021 15:51, Roland Perry wrote:
>>>>> In message <soddlq$ors$1@dont-email.me>, at 15:38:34 on Fri, 3 Dec
>>>>> 2021,
>>>>> Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> She finds it much better than having to use the ticket printing
>>>>>>>>> machine
>>>>>>>>> at the station.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> But doesn't cover the situation I'm describing, which is
>>>>>>>> last-minute
>>>>>>>> discretionary travel. The most likely discretionary I ticket I
>>>>>>>> might
>>>>>>>> buy
>>>>>>>> is £1.90. What a palaver just to avoid a £100 fin
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> What palaver?  Buy the ticket, get the email within seconds, open
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> PDF
>>>>>>> attachment if it doesn't happen automatically.  And, no, you don't
>>>>>>> need an
>>>>>>> Adobe account to view PDFs.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Roland’s world is unaccountably more difficult that everyone else’s.
>>>>>
>>>>> My most successful projects have involved understanding what the
>>>>> general
>>>>> public (not IT geeks) find easy or difficult, and as far as possible
>>>>> pre-navigating them through the maze.
>>>>>
>>>>> Train ticketing is a black art to most of the public, even without the
>>>>> added ingredient of e-ticketing where some flows are possible, and
>>>>> others aren't (and you can't tell which until after you spend quite a
>>>>> while wrestling, through a keyhole, with a user interface designed
>>>>> by a
>>>>> Vogon.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'm all right Jack at the moment as the TfW website and app are well
>>>> integrated and I can book tickets on my laptop which are available
>>>> on my
>>>> phone in the time I can pick it up to double check.
>>>>
>>>> I'm minded to create a new email address solely for emailed tickets so
>>>> they are easily accessible on my mobile.  It would be even more useful
>>>> for airline companies which dont have integrated apps as far as I know.
>>>>
>>>> I note that Roland has his own domain so I don't understand why he
>>>> cannot have an email address uniqually for tickets.
>>>
>>> Nobody, and that may well include Roland, understands his email setup.
>>
>> The thing is, emailed pdf tickets are convenient and work well for very
>> many people. Roland is moaning because the system isn’t convenient for
>> his
>> own unique and rather odd setup. He needs to change, because the system
>> isn’t going to change especially for him.
>
> My setup isn't the slightest bit odd, unless you regard the "busy-ness"
> of my email environment as fundamentally odd.

Many people here don't understand the practicalities and difficulties of
scaling up the amount of emails.

On 06/12/2021 07:38, Roland Perry wrote:
> In message <sog07r$dhj$1@dont-email.me>, at 15:07:38 on Sat, 4 Dec 2021,
> martin.coffee@round-midnight.org.uk remarked:
>> On 04/12/2021 13:36, Tweed wrote:
>>> Sam Wilson <ukr@dummy.wislons.fastmail.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> <martin.coffee@round-midnight.org.uk> wrote:
>>>>> On 03/12/2021 15:51, Roland Perry wrote:
>>>>>> In message <soddlq$ors$1@dont-email.me>, at 15:38:34 on Fri, 3 Dec
>>>>>> 2021,
>>>>>> Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> She finds it much better than having to use the ticket printing
>>>>>>>>>> machine
>>>>>>>>>> at the station.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> But doesn't cover the situation I'm describing, which is
>>>>>>>>> last-minute
>>>>>>>>> discretionary travel. The most likely discretionary I ticket I
>>>>>>>>> might
>>>>>>>>> buy
>>>>>>>>> is £1.90. What a palaver just to avoid a £100 fin
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> What palaver?  Buy the ticket, get the email within seconds,
>>>>>>>> open the
>>>>>>>> PDF
>>>>>>>> attachment if it doesn't happen automatically.  And, no, you don't
>>>>>>>> need an
>>>>>>>> Adobe account to view PDFs.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Roland’s world is unaccountably more difficult that everyone else’s.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> My most successful projects have involved understanding what the
>>>>>> general
>>>>>> public (not IT geeks) find easy or difficult, and as far as possible
>>>>>> pre-navigating them through the maze.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Train ticketing is a black art to most of the public, even without
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> added ingredient of e-ticketing where some flows are possible, and
>>>>>> others aren't (and you can't tell which until after you spend quite a
>>>>>> while wrestling, through a keyhole, with a user interface designed
>>>>>> by a
>>>>>> Vogon.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm all right Jack at the moment as the TfW website and app are well
>>>>> integrated and I can book tickets on my laptop which are available
>>>>> on my
>>>>> phone in the time I can pick it up to double check.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm minded to create a new email address solely for emailed tickets so
>>>>> they are easily accessible on my mobile.  It would be even more useful
>>>>> for airline companies which dont have integrated apps as far as I
>>>>> know.
>>>>>
>>>>> I note that Roland has his own domain so I don't understand why he
>>>>> cannot have an email address uniqually for tickets.
>>>>
>>>> Nobody, and that may well include Roland, understands his email setup.
>>>>
>>>  The thing is, emailed pdf tickets are convenient and work well for
>>> very  many people. Roland is moaning because the system isn’t
>>> convenient for his  own unique and rather odd setup. He needs to
>>> change, because the system  isn’t going to change especially for him.
>>
>> I agree that emailed pdf tickets can be convenient.  However I
>> received well over 4,000 emails during August and that's when they
>> become inconvenient as it relies on me being at home to either forward
>> to a specific email address on my phone or to ftp them there.
>> Searching through so many emails on a phone is just not viable.
>
> Emailing pdfs is also very clunky - why can't they push the tickets to
> the booking app, in the same way Google Play pushes new apps to your phone?

The old TfW app did exactly that.

You could order your tickets online and opt to collect card ones from
the station or send to your app.

I don't know how the new website and app will work.

>
> Although that begs the question of "what is 'the App' ". As I said the
> other day I have rather a large number of train booking apps, as well as
> bus booking apps, an electric bike booking app, and all the other
> ecommerce apps on the phone.
>
> I have an inkling I might be needing the Uber app later in the week. So
> far I've avoided using it, mainly because they don't have any cabs in
> the part of the country I live. But if I do travel somewhere and use it,
> will I find they insist on emailing me a pdf with the booking details,
> or will it magically appear in-app?
>
> [Sort of a genuine question, but I'd be very surprised to find it needed
>  a pdf viewer.]
>
>> Even using a specific email address for ticket providers is not viable
>> as I'm illegally on two email lists neither of which provide the
>> legally required link to remove myself for the same.
>>
>> I even get emails from a ToC whom I've had no business agreement with
>> apart from travelling on their services.  I can tell from the email
>> address they use exactly who provided it to them.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

In message <sokuro$pjf$2@dont-email.me>, at 12:14:48 on Mon, 6 Dec 2021,
martin.coffee@round-midnight.org.uk remarked:

>> Emailing pdfs is also very clunky - why can't they push the tickets
>>to the booking app, in the same way Google Play pushes new apps to
>>your phone?
>
>The old TfW app did exactly that.
>
>You could order your tickets online and opt to collect card ones from
>the station or send to your app.

Could you ask the website to push the tickets to the app?

>I don't know how the new website and app will work.

Part of the problem is that every website and app seems to be slightly
different, let alone the same booking engine often having availability
which varies from flow to flow even within the same TOC's area.
--
Roland Perry

In message <sokumr$pjf$1@dont-email.me>, at 12:12:11 on Mon, 6 Dec 2021,
martin.coffee@round-midnight.org.uk remarked:

>> My setup isn't the slightest bit odd, unless you regard the
>>"busy-ness" of my email environment as fundamentally odd.
>
>Many people here don't understand the practicalities and difficulties
>of scaling up the amount of emails.

And partly that's also reflected in their personal SLA for dealing with
emails. One person I've been communicating with recently hadn't replied,
so I went and asked them "did you get my email", and they said "yes, I
might read it tomorrow".

My setup with the 100+ folders is partly so that I can see at a glance
[the folder icon changes] when new emails have arrived (and I tend to
sort the folders so the more urgent ones are at the top) and if I'm at
my desk I'd expect to reply to those in a matter of minutes.

One of the things I admit I don't get on with are the pushed "alerts" on
phones, which I don't seem to be able to rank in order of priority, and
95% are false alarms (in the sense that they alerting me to something I
didn't need immediately[1]). It was much easier when the only two alerts
were SMS and voicemail.

[1] For example, just now Google Maps alerted me and asked if I'd rate a
pub I visited on Saturday evening. No; and they don't want to hear
what I thought, which is "order something on the menu that's
impossible to badly cook - all our three meals were dreadful. And
slow".
--
Roland Perry

On 2021-12-06 09:30:28 +0000, Roland Perry said:

> In message <sog19n$tro$2@dont-email.me>, at 15:25:43 on Sat, 4 Dec
> 2021, nib <news@ingram-bromley.co.uk> remarked:
>
>> I just have a folder for e-mails with tickets that haven't been used yet.
>> Copy e-mails in there when they arrive. Easily found there on phone,
>> tablet or computer, even if several days old. Delete when used.
>
> How well does that work when you are stood in the station car park,
> having bought a ticket a couple of minutes ago because the ticket
> machine was broken (or had an impossibly long queue)?

I have never encountered an email client that does not, by default,
sort by time/date with newest on top. If I have just this minute
bought the tickets, then the email with them will be right at the top
of the list on my email client. I can see the concern for having
bought tickets some time in the past so that they are burried under
days of more recent emails, necessitating some means of finding them,
but that doesn't affect just-bought-just-delivered emails.

Robin

On Mon, 6 Dec 2021 14:47:47 +0100, Bob <email@domain.com> wrote:

>On 2021-12-06 09:30:28 +0000, Roland Perry said:
>
>> In message <sog19n$tro$2@dont-email.me>, at 15:25:43 on Sat, 4 Dec
>> 2021, nib <news@ingram-bromley.co.uk> remarked:
>>
>>> I just have a folder for e-mails with tickets that haven't been used yet.
>>> Copy e-mails in there when they arrive. Easily found there on phone,
>>> tablet or computer, even if several days old. Delete when used.
>>
>> How well does that work when you are stood in the station car park,
>> having bought a ticket a couple of minutes ago because the ticket
>> machine was broken (or had an impossibly long queue)?
>
>I have never encountered an email client that does not, by default,
>sort by time/date with newest on top. If I have just this minute
>bought the tickets, then the email with them will be right at the top
>of the list on my email client. I can see the concern for having
>bought tickets some time in the past so that they are burried under
>days of more recent emails, necessitating some means of finding them,
>but that doesn't affect just-bought-just-delivered emails.

My email client sorts with newest at the bottom, with the focus on the
oldest unread email, so that clicking "next" takes you to the subsequent
email chronologically until you run out of unread ones.

Mark

On 06/12/2021 10:34, Recliner wrote:
> Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:
>> In message <sodekh$ds$1@dont-email.me>, at 15:54:57 on Fri, 3 Dec 2021,
>> Recliner <recliner.usenet@gmail.com> remarked:
>>
>>>> You've not followed the thread very well, have you?
>>>
>>> Your tortuous inability to relate to the 21st century is intriguing and
>>> amusing, but not something I choose to study and memorise in detail.
>>
>> The real is problem is I relate to the 21st Century too much, and hence
>> appreciate why it is, that so many IT solutions are not fit for purpose.
>
> For you, with your 20th century mindset. They work just fine for the rest
> of us.
>
>>
>> Perhaps you could remember that?
>
> We all know that you struggle with 21st century technology. You were a
> pioneer in low cost electronics 30-40 years ago, and are still stuck in
> that era.
>

No. Some people think that we exist for the convenience of organisations
or governments; the converse should be true.

The easiest and quickest way to buy rail tickets is from a competent
person at a station. A simple transaction should take as little as 10 -
15 seconds. Unless you have superfast broadband, it takes that long to
find the right website, never mind the time taken to find the required
stations & tickets.

Ticket machines at stations can be almost as fiddly. The last one I used
(pre-Covid) eventually let me find the ticket I wanted (a simple day
return, not operator-specific), and then wasted time asking if I wanted
someone's stupid "points" before it would issue a ticket.

And I am not going to buy another phone just to use to store rail
tickets, because my current phone battery will not last long enough to
reliably store tickets for a full day. (I can think of more interesting
things to buy; the phone currently does as much as I need.)

Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:
> In message <sofqsp$8cv$1@dont-email.me>, at 13:36:25 on Sat, 4 Dec 2021,
> Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>> Sam Wilson <ukr@dummy.wislons.fastmail.co.uk> wrote:
>>> <martin.coffee@round-midnight.org.uk> wrote:
>>>> On 03/12/2021 15:51, Roland Perry wrote:
>>>>> In message <soddlq$ors$1@dont-email.me>, at 15:38:34 on Fri, 3 Dec 2021,
>>>>> Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> She finds it much better than having to use the ticket printing
>>>>>>>>> machine
>>>>>>>>> at the station.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> But doesn't cover the situation I'm describing, which is last-minute
>>>>>>>> discretionary travel. The most likely discretionary I ticket I might
>>>>>>>> buy
>>>>>>>> is £1.90. What a palaver just to avoid a £100 fin
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> What palaver?  Buy the ticket, get the email within seconds, open the
>>>>>>> PDF
>>>>>>> attachment if it doesn't happen automatically.  And, no, you don't
>>>>>>> need an
>>>>>>> Adobe account to view PDFs.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Roland’s world is unaccountably more difficult that everyone else’s.
>>>>>
>>>>> My most successful projects have involved understanding what the general
>>>>> public (not IT geeks) find easy or difficult, and as far as possible
>>>>> pre-navigating them through the maze.
>>>>>
>>>>> Train ticketing is a black art to most of the public, even without the
>>>>> added ingredient of e-ticketing where some flows are possible, and
>>>>> others aren't (and you can't tell which until after you spend quite a
>>>>> while wrestling, through a keyhole, with a user interface designed by a
>>>>> Vogon.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'm all right Jack at the moment as the TfW website and app are well
>>>> integrated and I can book tickets on my laptop which are available on my
>>>> phone in the time I can pick it up to double check.
>>>>
>>>> I'm minded to create a new email address solely for emailed tickets so
>>>> they are easily accessible on my mobile. It would be even more useful
>>>> for airline companies which dont have integrated apps as far as I know.
>>>>
>>>> I note that Roland has his own domain so I don't understand why he
>>>> cannot have an email address uniqually for tickets.
>>>
>>> Nobody, and that may well include Roland, understands his email setup.
>>
>> The thing is, emailed pdf tickets are convenient and work well for very
>> many people. Roland is moaning because the system isn’t convenient for his
>> own unique and rather odd setup. He needs to change, because the system
>> isn’t going to change especially for him.
>
> My setup isn't the slightest bit odd, unless you regard the "busy-ness"
> of my email environment as fundamentally odd.

I have a busy email environment too. However, I can still get important
emails to my phone without them being obscured by the normal traffic. You
just seem to be unwilling to adapt/change or even modify your approach.

Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:
> In message <sog0jr$k1t$1@dont-email.me>, at 15:14:03 on Sat, 4 Dec 2021,
> Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>
>> There’s also nothing to stop you having an entirely different email
>> account, with a separate inbox for tickets. Most email clients handle
>> multiple accounts.
>
> That's something which doesn't scale on phones. I've tried this,
> specifically the last time this subject cropped up. And beyond about a
> dozen it gets unmanageable.

It does on my phone.

On 06/12/2021 13:05, Roland Perry wrote:
> In message <sokuro$pjf$2@dont-email.me>, at 12:14:48 on Mon, 6 Dec 2021,
> martin.coffee@round-midnight.org.uk remarked:
>
>>>  Emailing pdfs is also very clunky - why can't they push the tickets
>>> to  the booking app, in the same way Google Play pushes new apps to
>>> your phone?
>>
>> The old TfW app did exactly that.
>>
>> You could order your tickets online and opt to collect card ones from
>> the station or send to your app.
>
> Could you ask the website to push the tickets to the app?
There's a couple of tick boxes for the two options.
>
>> I don't know how the new website and app will work.
>
> Part of the problem is that every website and app seems to be slightly
> different, let alone the same booking engine often having availability
> which varies from flow to flow even within the same TOC's area.

In message <sokojc$g5b$3@dont-email.me>, at 10:27:56 on Mon, 6 Dec 2021,
Graeme Wall <rail@greywall.demon.co.uk> remarked:
>On 06/12/2021 09:36, Roland Perry wrote:
>> In message <sogl50$sb9$1@dont-email.me>, at 21:04:32 on Sat, 4 Dec
>>2021, Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>>
>>>>>>> You seem to delight in making life unnecessarily complicated for
>>>>>>> yourself and then blaming others for the inconvenience it causes you.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What would be unnecessarily complicated would be for me to have
>>>>>>routine e-tickets delivered to my phone, because then I'd need to
>>>>>>forward them either to my desktop (which is my preferred audit
>>>>>>trail for this kind of thing, and also the appliance with a
>>>>>>printer, which my phone isn't) or to the person who I bought the
>>>>>>ticket for (which is at least half of my purchases).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Forwarding stuff from a phone is far more fiddly than from my desktop.
>>>>>
>>>>> Well you’d better get used to it or stop travelling by train.
>>>>>The direction of all ticketing is heading away from ticket offices
>>>>>and ticket machines, and especially the use of cash. It will be
>>>>>salami slices, with a few wrong turns along the way, but it will happen.
>>>>
>>>> Which is why I buy my ticket from the staffed ticket office at my local
>>>> station.

>> Lucky you. And what if the ticket office has a notice in the window
>>saying "I'm on my break, back in half an hour" - which is a favourite
>>at Ely? Unless there's another saying "due to staff shortages, closed
>>today".

>> That's the point when lots of people reluctantly start using the
>>ticket machines, which promptly gets a ten minute queue, and then
>>runs out of blanks, and the downward spiral begins.
>
>Guildford station has two entrances, the main one with a staffed ticket
>office on the down (town) side, and another on the up side that only
>has a couple of ticket machines. This one is the one that is heavily
>used by students from the university as the bus stops right outside.
>Most of whom will be buying individual tickets for one-off journeys.
>I've never known it to run out of ticket blanks and I suspect far more
>people use it than the one at Ely.
>
>Sounds like another hypothetical "can't work in East Anglia" problem.

Perhaps they have a more consistent demand for tickets from machines,
and therefore aren't caught on the hop when there's a surge due to
unscheduled ticket office closures.

I discussed this with the staff the second or third time it happened,
and they said that someone would need to come out specially from
Cambridge to refill the machine. If *only* it had a 3tph train service!!
--
Roland Perry

Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:
> In message <sokpoq$ojr$1@dont-email.me>, at 11:47:52 on Mon, 6 Dec 2021,
> Bob <email@domain.com> remarked:
>> On 2021-12-04 04:35:24 +0000, Anna Noyd-Dryver said:
>>
>>> Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>>>> Why can't your phone access the same email accounts as your
>>>>> desktop?
>>>> Because the majority of my email is held on POP3 accounts that the
>>>> client can't access, nor would I want it to. It would be overwhelmed.
>>>>
>>> Can't you have an email client on your phone to access the one one
>>> specific POP3 account which you tickets get delivered to?
>>
>> The problem with POP3 is that it is designed around the idea that when
>> an email client downloads a message, it is no longer available on the
>> server.
>
> I wasn't attempting to contrast POP3 with IMAP, rather with webmail. But
> in any event, POP3 has a "keep on server" option.
>
>> This made sense when a person would access their email account from
>> exactly one computer, and when 1 MB was big, and server-side storage
>> limits caused problems.
>
> Ironically, when I was collecting email on the train back in the day,
> using 2.5G, I had a filter set up in the client to only download "small"
> emails (aka ones without attachments). The way that worked was because
> the server I was connecting to put the number of lines in the email into
> the header, and the client would read the headers of all the newly
> arrived emails, and then make a decision which to download (and only
> mark as "read" the ones fully downloaded).
>
> It was easy to carve a regular expression to look at that header entry
> and automatically skip any email with three or more digits in the
> line-count. Because any email with 100+ lines was almost certainly
> encumbered with an attachment.
>
> However, that solution, if still in place today, would mean that tickets
> delivered by PDF would be a non-starter.
>
>> In the modern era where 1 GB is not big anymore, having all of your
>> mail stored server side is not a problem, and most people have multiple
>> devices they want to access their email on. The solution to this
>> problem is IMAP, but for some reason Roland does not wish to use this
>> widely available solution, and would rather complain about the problem.
>
> As I've posted in several replies today, the issue isn't with IMAP, it's
> with the sorting and storing of thousands of emails on a phone (however
> it was they arrived there).

But they’re only cached on the phone. Your client doesn’t need to store
thousands of email on the phone.

> In other news, travelling home from Lincoln to Peterborough the other
> evening, and it being dark outside, I tried to use my phone to pass the
> time. For more than half the trip there was no usable mobile signal. So
> much for 20yrs of progress.

That’s the fens for you.

Sam

--
The entity formerly known as Sam.Wilson@ed.ac.uk
Spit the dummy to reply

On 06/12/2021 14:29, Bevan Price wrote:
> On 06/12/2021 10:34, Recliner wrote:
>> Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:
>>> In message <sodekh$ds$1@dont-email.me>, at 15:54:57 on Fri, 3 Dec 2021,
>>> Recliner <recliner.usenet@gmail.com> remarked:
>>>
>>>>> You've not followed the thread very well, have you?
>>>>
>>>> Your tortuous inability to relate to the 21st century is intriguing and
>>>> amusing, but not something I choose to study and memorise in detail.
>>>
>>> The real is problem is I relate to the 21st Century too much, and hence
>>> appreciate why it is, that so many IT solutions are not fit for purpose.
>>
>> For you, with your 20th century mindset.  They work just fine for the
>> rest
>> of us.
>>
>>>
>>> Perhaps you could remember that?
>>
>> We all know that you struggle with 21st century technology. You were a
>> pioneer in low cost electronics 30-40 years ago, and are still stuck in
>> that era.
>>
>
> No. Some people think that we exist for the convenience of organisations
> or governments; the converse should be true.
>
> The easiest and quickest way to buy rail tickets is from a competent
> person at a station. A simple transaction should take as little as 10 -
> 15 seconds. Unless you have superfast broadband, it takes that long to
> find the right website, never mind the time taken to find the required
> stations & tickets.
>
> Ticket machines at stations can be almost as fiddly. The last one I used
> (pre-Covid) eventually let me find the ticket I wanted (a simple day
> return, not operator-specific), and then wasted time asking if I wanted
> someone's stupid "points" before it would issue a ticket.

Where was that, I've never been offred any sort of points at a physical
ticket machine. Can think of a few websites that offer nectar points,
IIRC gWr is one.

>
> And I am not going to buy another phone just to use to store rail
> tickets, because my current phone battery will not last long enough to
> reliably store tickets for a full day. (I can think of more interesting
> things to buy; the phone currently does as much as I need.)
>
>

Another one who lives in the past, it was sometime in the 1990s that I
last had a phone that wouldn't last the day.

--
Graeme Wall
This account not read.

On 06/12/2021 15:49, Roland Perry wrote:
> In message <sokojc$g5b$3@dont-email.me>, at 10:27:56 on Mon, 6 Dec 2021,
> Graeme Wall <rail@greywall.demon.co.uk> remarked:
>> On 06/12/2021 09:36, Roland Perry wrote:
>>> In message <sogl50$sb9$1@dont-email.me>, at 21:04:32 on Sat, 4 Dec
>>> 2021,  Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>>>
>>>>>>>> You seem to delight in making life unnecessarily complicated for
>>>>>>>> yourself and then blaming others for the inconvenience it causes
>>>>>>>> you.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> What would be unnecessarily complicated would be for me to have
>>>>>>> routine  e-tickets delivered to my phone, because then I'd need
>>>>>>> to forward them  either to my desktop (which is my preferred
>>>>>>> audit trail for this  kind of  thing, and also the appliance with
>>>>>>> a printer, which my phone isn't) or  to the person who I bought
>>>>>>> the ticket for (which is at least half  of my  purchases).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Forwarding stuff from a phone is far more fiddly than from my
>>>>>>> desktop.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Well you’d better get used to it or stop travelling by train. The
>>>>>> direction  of all ticketing is heading away from ticket offices
>>>>>> and ticket  machines,  and especially the use of cash. It will be
>>>>>> salami slices, with a few  wrong  turns along the way, but it will
>>>>>> happen.
>>>>>
>>>>> Which is why I buy my ticket from the staffed ticket office at my
>>>>> local
>>>>> station.
>
>>>  Lucky you. And what if the ticket office has a notice in the window
>>> saying "I'm on my break, back in half an hour" - which is a favourite
>>> at  Ely? Unless there's another saying "due to staff shortages,
>>> closed today".
>
>>>  That's the point when lots of people reluctantly start using the
>>> ticket  machines, which promptly gets a ten minute queue, and then
>>> runs out of  blanks, and the downward spiral begins.
>>
>> Guildford station has two entrances, the main one with a staffed
>> ticket office on the down (town) side, and another on the up side that
>> only has a couple of ticket machines. This one is the one that is
>> heavily used by students from the university as the bus stops right
>> outside. Most of whom will be buying individual tickets for one-off
>> journeys. I've never known it to run out of ticket blanks and I
>> suspect far more people use it than the one at Ely.
>>
>> Sounds like another hypothetical "can't work in East Anglia" problem.
>
> Perhaps they have a more consistent demand for tickets from machines,
> and therefore aren't caught on the hop when there's a surge due to
> unscheduled ticket office closures.

Tends to get busier at the end of the week with students going away for
the weekend.

>
> I discussed this with the staff the second or third time it happened,
> and they said that someone would need to come out specially from
> Cambridge to refill the machine. If *only* it had a 3tph train service!!

Must ask the guys at Guildford how often they refill the machines.

--
Graeme Wall
This account not read.

In message <sofoqj$1ik$1@dont-email.me>, at 13:01:07 on Sat, 4 Dec 2021,
Sam Wilson <ukr@dummy.wislons.fastmail.co.uk> remarked:

>> Why can't your phone access the same email accounts as your desktop?
>>
>>> Forwarding stuff from a phone is far more fiddly than from my desktop.
>>
>> Why?
>
>It’s déja vu all over again

Doesn't make it any less true, though.
--
Roland Perry

Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:
> In message <sofoqj$1ik$1@dont-email.me>, at 13:01:07 on Sat, 4 Dec 2021,
> Sam Wilson <ukr@dummy.wislons.fastmail.co.uk> remarked:
>
>>> Why can't your phone access the same email accounts as your desktop?
>>>
>>>> Forwarding stuff from a phone is far more fiddly than from my desktop.
>>>
>>> Why?
>>
>> It’s déja vu all over again
>
> Doesn't make it any less true, though.

Doesn’t make it any less singular, either.

Sam

--
The entity formerly known as Sam.Wilson@ed.ac.uk
Spit the dummy to reply

In message <sof5v7$kis$1@dont-email.me>, at 07:39:19 on Sat, 4 Dec 2021,
Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>Anna Noyd-Dryver <anna@noyd-dryver.com> wrote:
>> Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Railway ticketing is fundamentally broken due the now Byzantine fare
>>> structure, which nobody seems willing to reform. No amount of fiddling with
>>> user interfaces is going to fix that.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> And don't forget that the majority of it, still, was inherited from BR.
>>
>> The problem is that any deep reform to fix it (eg, starting again from a
>> blank sheet with no reference to existing fares) is going to have some
>> winners (now with cheaper fares) and some losers (now with more expensive
>> fares) [1], and you can bet which will make headlines and which won't.
>>
>> [1] unless accompanied by a reversal of the 'transfer cost from taxpayer to
>> farebox' policy
>>
>>
>> Anna Noyd-Dryver
>>
>
>I’m not sure I buy the BR argument. Pre privatisation we had singles,
>returns, off peak returns and savers (Intercity to London). More
>importantly, the price differences between them were reasonable. Now
>returns have become Anytimes and are eye wateringly priced (£170 for 100
>miles to London). And there was none of this Advance ticket rubbish that
>restricts you to a given train.

Didn't BR have Apex and super-Apex fares?

>The argument for these is it gives people the opportunity to buy an
>affordable ticket. We used to have affordable flexible tickets before
>they were made very expensive. I can see an argument for pricing people
>off peak trains (hence off peak fares), but this idea that you get
>forced to go on one particular off peak train and can’t get the next
>one (which is equally likely to be carting fresh air around) is just
>daft. If you feel the need to guarantee a seat we already have a
>reservation system.

--
Roland Perry

In message <sodfnc$95v$1@dont-email.me>, at 16:13:32 on Fri, 3 Dec 2021,
Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:
>> In message <soddlq$ors$1@dont-email.me>, at 15:38:34 on Fri, 3 Dec 2021,
>> Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>>
>>>>>> She finds it much better than having to use the ticket printing machine
>>>>>> at the station.
>>>>>
>>>>> But doesn't cover the situation I'm describing, which is last-minute
>>>>> discretionary travel. The most likely discretionary I ticket I might buy
>>>>> is £1.90. What a palaver just to avoid a £100 fine!
>>>>
>>>> What palaver? Buy the ticket, get the email within seconds, open the PDF
>>>> attachment if it doesn't happen automatically. And, no, you don't need an
>>>> Adobe account to view PDFs.
>>>
>>> Roland’s world is unaccountably more difficult that everyone else’s.
>>
>> My most successful projects have involved understanding what the general
>> public (not IT geeks) find easy or difficult, and as far as possible
>> pre-navigating them through the maze.
>>
>> Train ticketing is a black art to most of the public, even without the
>> added ingredient of e-ticketing where some flows are possible, and
>> others aren't (and you can't tell which until after you spend quite a
>> while wrestling, through a keyhole, with a user interface designed by a
>> Vogon.
>
>Railway ticketing is fundamentally broken due the now Byzantine fare
>structure, which nobody seems willing to reform. No amount of fiddling with
>user interfaces is going to fix that.

User interfaces of independent sites are generally much better than
institutionalised ones. And if (like the line near me) there are
weekend-only "Super off peak fares", then failing to offer them to
people unless they know to ask for them, isn't a problem with the fares
database, rather than the programmers.

Unless the programmers have been instructed by the marketing people to
go to any lengths to try to stop people buying them, at which point we
have a much more serious problem (but once again, isn't the richness of
the tickets itself).
--
Roland Perry

In message <sofoo6$vdd$1@dont-email.me>, at 12:59:50 on Sat, 4 Dec 2021,
Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> remarked:
>Graeme Wall <rail@greywall.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 04/12/2021 07:39, Tweed wrote:
>>> Anna Noyd-Dryver <anna@noyd-dryver.com> wrote:
>>>> Tweed <usenet.tweed@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Railway ticketing is fundamentally broken due the now Byzantine fare
>>>>> structure, which nobody seems willing to reform. No amount of
>>>>>fiddling with
>>>>> user interfaces is going to fix that.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> And don't forget that the majority of it, still, was inherited from BR.
>>>>
>>>> The problem is that any deep reform to fix it (eg, starting again from a
>>>> blank sheet with no reference to existing fares) is going to have some
>>>> winners (now with cheaper fares) and some losers (now with more expensive
>>>> fares) [1], and you can bet which will make headlines and which won't.
>>>>
>>>> [1] unless accompanied by a reversal of the 'transfer cost from taxpayer to
>>>> farebox' policy
>>>
>>> I’m not sure I buy the BR argument. Pre privatisation we had singles,
>>> returns, off peak returns and savers (Intercity to London). More
>>> importantly, the price differences between them were reasonable. Now
>>> returns have become Anytimes and are eye wateringly priced (£170 for 100
>>> miles to London). And there was none of this Advance ticket rubbish that
>>> restricts you to a given train. The argument for these is it gives people
>>> the opportunity to buy an affordable ticket. We used to have affordable
>>> flexible tickets before they were made very expensive. I can see an
>>> argument for pricing people off peak trains (hence off peak fares), but
>>> this idea that you get forced to go on one particular off peak train and
>>> can’t get the next one (which is equally likely to be carting fresh air
>>> around) is just daft. If you feel the need to guarantee a seat we already
>>> have a reservation system.
>>>
>>
>> Sorry that is a load of golden age guff. There were more than the just 3
>> types of ticket even in BR days. Complaints about the fares being too
>> high were universal than as now.
>
>Depends where you live. Down south you appear to have remarkably good value
>tickets compared to the East Midlands. Bet you don’t pay 85p/mile for an
>Anytime ticket.

Straw poll: Cambridge to Kings Cross, £53 for 45 miles (it wasn't clear
if you meant the miles both ways).

Nottingham to Leicester £28 for 21 miles [does seem a bit expensive].
--
Roland Perry

In message <soko64$ccm$3@dont-email.me>, at 10:20:52 on Mon, 6 Dec 2021,
Graeme Wall <rail@greywall.demon.co.uk> remarked:
>On 06/12/2021 09:30, Roland Perry wrote:
>> In message <sog19n$tro$2@dont-email.me>, at 15:25:43 on Sat, 4 Dec
>>2021, nib <news@ingram-bromley.co.uk> remarked:
>>
>>> I just have a folder for e-mails with tickets that haven't been used
>>>yet.
>>> Copy e-mails in there when they arrive. Easily found there on phone,
>>> tablet or computer, even if several days old. Delete when used.
>> How well does that work when you are stood in the station car park,
>>having bought a ticket a couple of minutes ago because the ticket
>>machine was broken (or had an impossibly long queue)?
>> That's the use-case which started this thread.
>>
>>> Occasionaly a slight annoyance is when the e-mail titles are
>>>something like "your tickets".
>>
>Anybody sensible standing in the car park will use an email address
>they can access from the phone in their hand. Problem solved.

Only if they've previously set up a special account on that site under
that address. Otherwise it takes too long. And why should people have to
bend over backwards for train ticket vendors, when there are thousands
of other ecommerce services which don't put the same hurdles in the way
of prospective customers?

I know the answer by the way; the railway industry is convinced their
product is a distress perchance and couldn't give a monkey's about the
customer.
--
Roland Perry

In message <sol4a5$4q2$1@dont-email.me>, at 14:47:47 on Mon, 6 Dec 2021,
Bob <email@domain.com> remarked:
>On 2021-12-06 09:30:28 +0000, Roland Perry said:
>
>> In message <sog19n$tro$2@dont-email.me>, at 15:25:43 on Sat, 4 Dec
>>2021, nib <news@ingram-bromley.co.uk> remarked:
>>
>>> I just have a folder for e-mails with tickets that haven't been used
>>>yet.
>>> Copy e-mails in there when they arrive. Easily found there on phone,
>>> tablet or computer, even if several days old. Delete when used.

>> How well does that work when you are stood in the station car park,
>>having bought a ticket a couple of minutes ago because the ticket
>>machine was broken (or had an impossibly long queue)?
>
>I have never encountered an email client that does not, by default,
>sort by time/date with newest on top.

You need to get out more, and also realise that email users sometimes
don't use the default settings.

>If I have just this minute bought the tickets, then the email with them
>will be right at the top of the list on my email client. I can see the
>concern for having bought tickets some time in the past so that they
>are burried under days of more recent emails, necessitating some means
>of finding them, but that doesn't affect just-bought-just-delivered
>emails.

--
Roland Perry

On 06/12/2021 17:22, Graeme Wall wrote:
> On 06/12/2021 14:29, Bevan Price wrote:
>> On 06/12/2021 10:34, Recliner wrote:
>>> Roland Perry <roland@perry.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> In message <sodekh$ds$1@dont-email.me>, at 15:54:57 on Fri, 3 Dec 2021,
>>>> Recliner <recliner.usenet@gmail.com> remarked:
>>>>
>>>>>> You've not followed the thread very well, have you?
>>>>>
>>>>> Your tortuous inability to relate to the 21st century is intriguing
>>>>> and
>>>>> amusing, but not something I choose to study and memorise in detail.
>>>>
>>>> The real is problem is I relate to the 21st Century too much, and hence
>>>> appreciate why it is, that so many IT solutions are not fit for
>>>> purpose.
>>>
>>> For you, with your 20th century mindset.  They work just fine for the
>>> rest
>>> of us.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps you could remember that?
>>>
>>> We all know that you struggle with 21st century technology. You were a
>>> pioneer in low cost electronics 30-40 years ago, and are still stuck in
>>> that era.
>>>
>>
>> No. Some people think that we exist for the convenience of
>> organisations or governments; the converse should be true.
>>
>> The easiest and quickest way to buy rail tickets is from a competent
>> person at a station. A simple transaction should take as little as 10
>> - 15 seconds. Unless you have superfast broadband, it takes that long
>> to find the right website, never mind the time taken to find the
>> required stations & tickets.
>>
>> Ticket machines at stations can be almost as fiddly. The last one I
>> used (pre-Covid) eventually let me find the ticket I wanted (a simple
>> day return, not operator-specific), and then wasted time asking if I
>> wanted someone's stupid "points" before it would issue a ticket.
>
> Where was that, I've never been offred any sort of points at a physical
> ticket machine. Can think of a few websites that offer nectar points,
> IIRC gWr is one.
>

Runcorn (before Covid) -- and it was offering nectar points (I couldn't
remember the name, as I have never used them).

I was buying a day return to Crewe, where I intended to buy a West
Midlands Day Ranger ticket (The machines did not sell such things, and
the Runcorn ticket office was a little late in opening.)

In message <686sqg9gtunuckr5499a9iqphjeciujl2k@4ax.com>, at 14:09:12 on
Mon, 6 Dec 2021, Mark Goodge <usenet@listmail.good-stuff.co.uk>
remarked:
>On Mon, 6 Dec 2021 14:47:47 +0100, Bob <email@domain.com> wrote:
>
>>On 2021-12-06 09:30:28 +0000, Roland Perry said:
>>
>>> In message <sog19n$tro$2@dont-email.me>, at 15:25:43 on Sat, 4 Dec
>>> 2021, nib <news@ingram-bromley.co.uk> remarked:
>>>
>>>> I just have a folder for e-mails with tickets that haven't been used yet.
>>>> Copy e-mails in there when they arrive. Easily found there on phone,
>>>> tablet or computer, even if several days old. Delete when used.
>>>
>>> How well does that work when you are stood in the station car park,
>>> having bought a ticket a couple of minutes ago because the ticket
>>> machine was broken (or had an impossibly long queue)?
>>
>>I have never encountered an email client that does not, by default,
>>sort by time/date with newest on top. If I have just this minute
>>bought the tickets, then the email with them will be right at the top
>>of the list on my email client. I can see the concern for having
>>bought tickets some time in the past so that they are burried under
>>days of more recent emails, necessitating some means of finding them,
>>but that doesn't affect just-bought-just-delivered emails.
>
>My email client sorts with newest at the bottom, with the focus on the
>oldest unread email, so that clicking "next" takes you to the subsequent
>email chronologically until you run out of unread ones.

Yes, that's what mine does too, also with newsgroup postings. Therefore
to reply to this one of yours at 2pm today, I had to consciously skip
past many starting from 4pm Friday (yes, I'm a bit behind, and that's
just on *this* thread in *this* newsgroup).
--
Roland Perry