[TriLUG] Rant: Please trim responses

[John Matthews]

On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 09:36, Mike Johnson wrote:
> Could you do us all a favor and trim your responses?  Include the
> relavant bits that you're responding to, but there's no need to quote
> the previous message, and the message previous to that, and the
> message previous to that, all the way back to the beginning of the
> thread.

Mike, I'm with you. However, I've had this discussion with my wife
because I showed her how outrageous some of the email that bounces
around her department looks when you really start to consider that
*most* of the information in the replies was useless lines from previous
mails in the thread. She says my attitude is elitist, and has nothing to
do with clear, concise communication as I've tried to portray it. I
guess she's right to an extent, but I don't think that that should take
too much away from the point about being clear and concise. I think it
also frustrates me that she says it is too much work to reply in-line to
sections of text.

To make this Linux related: perhaps Linux mailers could be helpful by
including a pop-up that is trigged when the first reply email (ever) is
sent by the user. If it detects that the user has quoted the entire
original message at the bottom and the reply text is tiny by comparison,
it can remind the user that that is considered poor form by some users
and that their email could potentially be better understood with just a
touch more editing and sparing inclusions of the original email.
Naturally, it would be nice if all mailers on all platforms worked
harder to encourage good etiquette.

Ah well.

Regards,
matt

-- 
Matt Matthews     \ ph: 919.660.2811        \ Use GNU/Linux  _o) w00t
Duke Univ., Postdoc\ jvmatthe at math.duke.edu  \____________   /\\
Dept. of Mathematics\ http://www.math.duke.edu/~jvmatthe/ \ _\_V