Hi all, Some members of the list asked me over the weekend to announce a policy about posting replies to the list. The issue comes when one indiscriminately copies the entire message to which one is replying. After a couple of iterations, this produces very long messages with very little new content. The length of these messages increases expense for customers using wireless or dial up service.
Better practice is to copy only fragments of text to which one is replying, or, if one is replying more generally, summarising the gist of the earlier posting. What we certainly should be avoiding are messages that end with a long appendix of quoted material from the thread.
I'm a terrible offender myself, I know, and not all mailers will let you eliminate the copied text (my PDA doesn't seem to allow that for example). But most mail clients do.
Thanks.
-Dan
P.S. To do my bit, I've eliminated that annoying "DM-L" header that prefixed every message... the source of the other complaint this weekend. ;)
Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
Hi all, Some members of the list asked me over the weekend to announce a policy about posting replies to the list. The issue comes when one indiscriminately copies the entire message to which one is replying.
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I'm a terrible offender myself, I know, and not all mailers will letyou eliminate the copied text (my PDA doesn't seem to allow that for example). But most mail clients do.
I am also probably a terrible offender in this respect, but for an entirely different reason. In my chosen mail client (Mozilla Thunderbird, which in its most recent versions I highly recommend), I have an extension installed called 'QuoteCollapse'. If you find yourself on many lists where people do not trim messages, then it is extremely useful. It collapses previously quoted material to have only its first line visible with one of those + or - icons to expand or collapse the rest of the quote body. While making sure to trim messages down to their relevant portions is of course something we should encourage, I thought others might like to know of this Thunderbird Extension.
Apologies for any previous lack of trimming, -James
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Daniel O'Donnell -
James Cummings