I've been following this discussion and I have a lengthy comment. Let me begin by quoting Robert Heinlein:
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as 'empty,' 'meaningless,' or 'dishonest,' and scorn to use them. No matter how pure their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best." I have heard myriad arguments advanced for abandoning or modifying email etiquette over the past ten, twenty, thirty years. None of them have ever been accompanied by a convincing rationale that demonstrates why the proposed changes are substantive improvements that quantitatively and qualitatively improve the use of email as a communications medium. Nearly all of them have been proposed by people of limited and brief experience, people without substantial experience in large and diverse environments, people who do not understand how email actually works, people who do not grasp the scalability issues involved, people who have never read the RFCs, people who have never used more than one email client or operating system, people who make the serious mistake of reading their email with a web browser, people who simply want to do what they want to do because their world view is myopic and selfish, people who think email should be instant messaging, people who naively think the web is the most important part of the Internet, people who do not understand that not everyone enjoys the high-speed/low-cost connectivity that they do, people who use horribly broken and/or non-standards-compliant email clients, people who think email should be used for large file transfer, people who don't send/receive large volumes of messages, people who don't participate in mailing lists, people who don't understand the difference (and similarities) between Usenet and email, people who have never bothered to learn and understand proper email etiquette, or all of the above. We of course see these same people top-posting, full-quoting, sending email marked up with HTML, failing to wrap their lines, carelessly sending mailing list followups both on-list and off-list, and engaging in similar rude, lazy, impolite, stupid and completely unprofessional behavior. What we do not see are any of them advancing cogent, carefully-made arguments for change. That is NOT to say such arguments don't exist: perhaps they do. Perhaps there are changes that *should* be made. But 100% of the onus for demonstrating that in a compelling fashion, including a full explanation of how such changes will make email better AND a careful examination of the drawbacks to such proposed changes, rests with those advocating for change. Simply put, they must prove it or admit that they cannot make the case. I'm a huge fan of change. But I'm NOT a fan of gratuitous, ill-considered change in order to accomodate those individuals who want it merely because they're selfish and/or inexperienced and/or ignorant. In this particular case, for instance, those advocating a change from the useful courtesy of sane line-wrap MUST provide a full justification for that. They must show how it's an improvement, not merely something that *should* be done because it *can* be done. They must fully enumerate all of the consequences of such a change, taking into consideration for example the extant universe of email clients, the command-line tools used to process email (after all: anyone who doesn't work at the command line can hardly claim to be knowledgeable or professional -- at best, they are an amateur, a dilettante, a newbie), the pre- and post-processing performed by MUAs, MTAs, MDAs, etc. -- and more. This will take considerable thought, research and time. It's not a simple issue. It'd be convenient if it were...but it's not. Some people will decline to do that, which is fine. But such a refusal is of course a full public admission that they've failed to make the case and thus that even they, themselves, admit that their suggestion has absolutely no merit whatsoever. Far more briefly: prove it. ---rsk