* Paul Schinder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
This is all grossly off topic. I suggest taking this thread off the
list ASAP and apologize for the inconvenience caused by my unnecessary
rudeness.
[my complaint about overhead through uncropped quotes]
> Does anyone else see what he's complaining about? I've read this
> thread using MacOS Eudora, and just looked at one of the messages with
> mutt, and I see nothing out of the ordinary.
Because I reformatted his mail according to age-old standards. In short,
it boils down to the following:
· your text goes below the quoted text;
· trim and if necessary reformat malformed quotes to the absolute
minimum, using "[...]" where necessary;
· a line ends at 80 charactes max.;
· no HTML, format-fla^Hwed, or similar "enhancements" on mailing lists -
ASCII only;
· an attribution line is 1 (one) line;
· sigdashes are "-- " (aka dash, dash, blank RET - you, Paul, are missing
the blank, rendering the whole thing useless for both my address book
(which is aimed at snarfing information from signatures) and my email
setup that automatically nukes signatures in replies);
> (Reminds me of the time some idiot flamed me on Usenet for using "}"
> instead of ">" as the quoting character.)
Might as well have been me. ">" is for quoted text in a reply, "|" is
for quotes from external sources. Using non-standard conformant quote
strings breaks many editors in the way that text cannot be automatically
reformatted to fit the "80 char per line" limit. It's nice and dandy
that you can do loads of things you might think funny with your MUA -
but it does not really mean you *have* to do them, right? I mean, I
could do quoted-printable, text-enriched text with nested citations and
a 10 line "attribution line". It's all here and I could even encode it
according to some arcane standards. But it would annoy you just as much
as mindless use of toys like Outlook annoys me (and AFAICS the majority
of technically-minded users all over the Net). Rationale: some people
actually pay for download. Full quotes with HTML make an email
significantly bigger than necessary (like, 5 times per average) without
buying the reader anything. All it takes is a little thoughtfulness on
behalf of the users of inferior (or badly set up) software (cf. my sig
for a good tool). Is that asked too much, Paul?
--
Robin S. Socha <http://socha.net/Gnus/>
