When writing to this list...

Alexander Boström abo at kth.se
Mon Jul 23 08:54:53 UTC 2007


Hi,

Sorry if this sounds harsh... Just, please try to follow this, ok? I'm
pretty sure most would agree with me on this one.

This is a plea to everyone posting to this list. Please try to quote
properly when replying to mails. It's rather tiresome, when scanning new
messages in the list, to have to scroll down to the bottom of a message
to see if it's interesting at all because the whole Evo preview window
is showing *only* quoted text which I just read two seconds ago. Chances
are I'll just skip the message entirely, only reading the messages which
are easy to read.

The dos:

      * Quote only the paragraphs that you're actually commenting.
      * If a quoted paragraph is long, maybe quote just parts of it.
      * If you're writing a general reply which isn't written in the
        context of a specific paragraph of the parent message, then
        don't quote at all. Or just quote some small part of the parent
        message. (Or top-post, some would suggest. I'm not going to
        suggest that, but I'm not going to protest it either.)

The do nots:

      * Don't quote the entire parent message, including sigs and all,
        just to write some short comment at the end.
      * To quote a signature is usually a bad idea, unless you're
        commenting on it specifically. We already have the "Foo Bar
        wrote..." at the beginning of the quote.
      * As a general rule, if the first 20-30 lines of the message
        you're about to send is just quoted text, there's probably
        something wrong.
      * Don't be lazy!

There are numerous examples to show what I mean, but I'm not going to
point to them. :)  And yes, sometimes it is useful to quote a bit more
than usual, but keep it within reason.

Also, remember, in Evolution, if you select a part of a message and then
hit Reply to all, only that part of the message will be quoted. It's a
good feature.

Thank you!
/abo

PS. Yes, I'm going to upgrade my 1280×1024 LCD someday. But not now, and
perhaps I'd like to use the extra pixels for better text resolution
instead of to fit more text... DS.





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