Tim wrote:
John Summerfield:
Tim, I wish you wouldn't do that. Email clients (I'm using seamonkey,
but others do it too) can display messages in threads, so one can see
who said what in response to whom.
Your montage replies stuff that up(-:
This is nothing to do with "threads." And I didn't "write" the stuff
below where you said "Tim wrote:". I may well have sent that, but I
didn't write it.
I was illustrating your reply, not implying you wrote all that text.
If i want to see responses to what Aaron or Jonathon or Mike said, and
your text is below someone else's reply, then the thread of the
conversation is indeed broken.
I attribute who says what above what they say, in the prior message.
Generally doing no more than two or three generations of quotes back.
Snippage is easy (simply slice off a paragraph and attribution at the
top), doesn't attribute text to someone else, doesn't require
interpretation to figure out who said what.
I *HATE* this sort of crap:
Fred:
John wrote:
Barney wrote:
Wilma wrote:
I have *figure* out that Wilma wrote this
That Barney wrote this
work out John wrote this
and have to figure out that Fred wrote this
Playing join the dots between text and attribution is a hodge podge mess
of disorganised crap. I'd sooner have HTML mail with hover-over-text
author identification than try and unravel lazy multi-generational
quotes.
I try to clip to accurately reflect the bits I want to respond to.
Sometimes I leave a little more to help those who google their way into
an archive. If you do that too, then your replies should be easy to fathom.
As it is, we have all those underclipped and poorly clipped responses,
we have email from those who try to clip properly, and then we have
Tim's style, and only Tim knows what rules he follows.
Which get worse with bad snippage, hideous line wraps that bugger up the
insertions of quote indicators, clients that don't insert quote
prefixes, and very long posts, where all the attribution is up off the
top of the screen.
I can agree with all that, and further assert that problems lookout
express users have are because they haven't learned how to configure it
properly (I don't use it myself, never have, but I've seen "I can't" and
"here's how you do" exchanges by those who do use it.
Notes has its own style, is really stuffed, but I've not seen any
evidence of folk using it here.
oh dear. It's raining in Adelaide.
--
Cheers
John
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