[Leica] Re: learn to post your message

[Jeff Moore <jbm@jbm.org>]

At 25 Mar 1999 19:27:50 -0800, "Gary Todoroff" <datamaster@humboldt1.com> wrote:
> With the number of postings to the LUG, if I can't get right to the message
> on top in preview mode, I delete it.

Details of the user interface of your particular email client should have
no bearing on proper, long-conventional polite email reply practices.

> Sorry, Roger, maybe I have missed some good postings from you. I really
> encourage people to respond with the own words at the top.

Roger actually gave an excellent example of correct, polite replying:

 - he only copied those snippets to which he was supplying a direct response;

 - he introduced his responses by pasting in the quotes then following them 
   immediately with his responses;

 - he marked the parts he was quoting with the conventional greater-than signs
   at the left margin;

 - he identified whose text he was quoting, and when that text was sent.

I think that part of the problem is that many people writing email today 
haven't been properly steeped in the decades-long traditions of email, and 
another part is that many current GUIfied mail user agents make it really 
difficult to reply properly.  For example, a good user agent, one designed 
with knowledge of conventional practice, will offer to paste the replied-to 
message into the send buffer, set off with the chosen quote prefix (usually
"> ") and with the sender's name and timestamp at top, with one simple 
(keyboard or mouse) gesture.  Then it's the user's responsibility to wade in, 
cut out the deadwood, insert substantive comments, and let fly.

A bad user agent (the worst which comes immediately to mind from personal 
experience would be that travesty, Lotus Notes, but I'm sure Microsoft can do 
equally bad work) stuffs the entire replied-to message (or a string of them) 
at the bottom like a chain of cast-lead albatrosses, perhaps capable of being 
"hidden" if "closed" using some proprietary GUI button which corresponds to no
existing standard part of an email message.  If the user's mail program seems 
to encourage, nay enforce, bad email practices, then users who've seen nothing 
else, or even users who know better but have gotten tired of jumping throught 
the awkward hoops necessary to fight the bad software and compose a proper 
piece of email, will fall into these sloppy practices.

I have to assume, then, that "Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5" 
encourages Mr. Todoroff in such broken practices.  You'll note that his
quotation from Mr. Beamon, lying at the bottom, has no quotation-prefix 
setting off each line;  but then, I know well how difficult doing the right 
thing can be when wrestling with a determinedly wrongheaded piece of software. 
Quite a few of the damned WinDoze-based things, it seems, fancy themselves to 
be pint-sized word processors, and they run each paragraph together in one 
unbroken line for filling later, instead of inserting hard carriage returns at 
each line end.  When faced with one of those things, it isn't sufficient even 
to insert proper line-quoting characters manually, because what you thought 
were the beginnings of lines might later squirm somewhere else.  No, you have 
to insert carriage returns manually, too.  GAAAH!

 -Jeff Moore <jbm@jbm.org>