OT email response format (was Re: TTL computing)

From: Christopher Smith <csmith_at_amdocs.com>
Date: Tue Apr 16 10:25:54 2002

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tothwolf [mailto:tothwolf_at_concentric.net]

> Then I guess you will have to deal with people like myself
> reformatting
> your emails when replying. I personally can't stand to see an
> email thread
> with mostly proper quoting where someone replies at the top.
> Several email
> lists I'm on have an enforced rule that email must be quoted
> and threaded
> properly.

That's all good and everything, but I'm certain I'd have reservations
about subscribing to a mailing list that enforced it.

It so happens that it's quite a bit of extra effort for me to
re-format mail so that it looks acceptable, and should I not have
the time, yes, I will reply in a form closer to what this piece of
$(*& mail client tries to shove down my throat -- I do that both
because I just don't have the time to write a well-formatted reply,
and because it is not that offensive.

HTML is a different story, since most sane people, given a choice of
mail readers, would pick one that won't display it. On the other hand,
that can be stripped out automatically, leaving no trouble for the
people on either end of the conversation.

At any rate, removing a post, or a subscriber, because they put the
quotations in the wrong place is completely idiotic; this is done,
right, or how else would the rule be enforced?

> To date, all of the email etiquette information I've read
> states that a
> reply should always follow the quoted text, with the authors'
> names at the
> very top. Quotes should also be trimmed down, sometimes to just one
> author's text. Any extra or unnecessary quoted text (including sigs)
> should be removed to save bandwith.

Sure, in a perfect world, that's great, but I've seen some very
informative posts that don't follow these rules. Would you just dump
them? You're certainly not going to talk everybody into following all
of these rules all of the time.

> If the subject of a thread changes significantly, the subject
> line should
> be modified accordingly. A modified subject line should
> typically include
> _at least_ 1/3-1/2 of the original subject line text,
> prefixed by 'was',
> and surrounded by parentheses. The current subject line is a
> good example.

Indeed it should, but again, people forget, or just get lazy, and
that doesn't mean that the text of the message is any less valuable.

I suppose the point of this whole rant is that regardless of how good
these rules are, people will not follow all of them all of the time,
and there's really nothing you, or I, or anyone else, can, or should,
do about it. (There must be a rule about the number of ,,,s in a
single sentence.) That being said, and this being off topic (on top
of the fact that it's a problem that can't -- or shouldn't -- be
fixed), I'll shut up now.

Chris


Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL

/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
 
Received on Tue Apr 16 2002 - 10:25:54 BST