[Air-l] Reducing quotes

[E. Sean Rintel]

Hi all,

See, now that I've delurked I can't stop. Damn. Anyway, a number of people 
have written about reducing the amount of needless quotation on the list, 
particularly for Digest users (among whom I count myself). I think that one 
of the reasons that there is so much wasted space is that, through no fault 
of their own, people don't know their way around their email programs and 
thus don't know how powerful the reply features are. I think that the 
mailserver script suggestions that have been made are good, but they take 
away the need for a user to understand even the basics of the etiquette, 
not ot mention functionality, of replying. Of course, it is arguable that 
people shouldn't *need* to put that effort in, but since every other 
interaction structure has some things that need to be done manually, I 
don't see why email should be all that different. (This is a little like 
the automatic seatbelts vs manual seatbelts argument). Anyway, here are a 
couple of suggestions for people to reduce the amount of needless quotation 
in their replies.

Simply changing settings from quoting the original email *within* the reply 
as opposed to *after* the reply shows you how much extraneous material you 
are sending.You can then cut away what you don't need. Some programs just 
provide 'include previous email in reply' rather than allowing you to 
choose, in which case once you have hit reply you should cut away material 
before responding.

Better yet: In Eudora - not sure about other programs but I would suspect 
this is the case - there is an undocumented feature that if you simply 
highlight the piece of an email that you want to respond to, *then* hit 
reply, the resulting reply email only has the part of the email that you 
highlighted. This does away with the need to even cut away what you don't need.

And now I *really* must dash.

Until anon,

Sean



--

E. Sean Rintel
Communication Department
University at Albany
State University of New York
Albany, NY, USA, 12222
http://www.albany.edu/~er8430/