[arch-general] Quoting of E-mails

[Loui Chang]

On Mon 11 Jan 2010 21:33 -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> re-read the old stuff over and over again.  Nothing annoys me more
> than haveing to page through five generations of past messages in a
> single thread to get all the way to the bottom just to have a single
> line of text say something like "Thank you" or "I agree" or whatever.

Fortunately I find that sort of thing isn't too common on the mailing
lists. Usually more interesting or useful commentary is added to the
discussion.

> The only thing that makes bottom-posting, like this bareable to me at
> all is Mutt's 'S' command which takes the cursor down to the unquoted
> text for much quicker reading.

I also find mutt's 'T' helps. It hides the quoted text.

> If bottom-posting is so passionately desirable, then may I suggest
> people trim down the history of a thread to the most recent 1 or 2
> generations back.  Or maybe even better, just reply with no quoting
> and and briefly summarize the quoted context.  Yeah, I realize quoting
> past context is more work.  I just find that when people top-post, I
> can seem to get through the mud a lot faster.

Indeed trimming quotes is part of proper email ettiquette along with
bottom posting. Sometimes I think people should pass a quiz before
they're allowed to post to the mailing list.

I think part of the problem is that some email clients like gmail
webmail help persist the bad behaviour. They default with top posting
replies and sending HTML emails. I have requested that they change the
defaults, but haven't gotten any response. It isn't a big surprise
though.