Slashdot Mirror
Quoting in Emails?
Shanes asks: "I want to know how slashdot readers feel about the
IMO ever worse quoting habits of people writing mails. When I started
writing emails to friends and colleagues over 10 years ago I and
everyone else quickly learned how
to quote. These days most of the bytes in my inbox are "Original Message" quotes that
Outlook people always include at the end of every mail. Doesn't anyone care about sending well
edited mails anymore?" I have a simple rule, if I can't read it
without editing it first, it's probably not worth my time. Do any
of you get frustrated by the formatting of email in your inbox?
Do any of you get frustrated by the formatting of email in your inbox?
No.
Our whole company uses outlook. Everybody uses the default quoting system
Yes, they do.
--- original message ---
from : Bob
subject : v. important
Do the widgets work?
-- original message --
from : Boris
subject : v.important
Got any questions about the widgets?
That works for me
1) The most important information is at the top.
2) I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion.
Hogsback
The worst has to be when you send a long email to somebody, and it makes it way back to you with the original message and "YES!!!!!!!!" at the top, but let's not talk about top-posting in email.
Frankly the argument is way too anal. So you don't like the way others send email, sorry. You can only maintain a higher standard for yourself. Send your's in a proper fashion and ignore the oafs.
Nothing but a whine
Slashdot stretching for content
Why is this headlined?
include $sig;
1;
Yes, poorly formatted emails suck, it takes forever to find just where to click to get to that "FREE PORN!!! NO CREDIT CARD NEEDED!!!!!" site.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
And it's even better when they put the "YES!!!!" right at the bottom, so you have to scroll past your own message to see a single word of theirs!
Yeah, it's as annoying as hell... Shanes asks: "I want to know how slashdot readers feel about the IMO ever worse quoting habits of people writing mails. When I started writing emails to friends and colleagues over 10 years ago I and everyone else quickly learned how to quote. These days most of the bytes in my inbox are "Original Message" quotes that Outlook people always include at the end of every mail. Doesn't anyone care about sending well edited mails anymore?" I have a simple rule, if I can't read it without editing it first, it's probably not worth my time. Do any of you get frustrated by the formatting of email in your inbox?
And it's even better when they put the "YES!!!!" right at the bottom, so you have to scroll past your own message to see a single word of theirs!
Yep, it is, assuming they are in possession of half an ounce of intelligence, in which case they will quote only the specific question you asked (to which they are replying with "YES!!!!").
Chances are the question you asked is short enough (when properly quoted) that both it and the response will be visible immediately, without the need for any scrolling.
Topher
The people who make the big e-mail software (Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook) have no concept of good e-mail editing techniques. I haven't used Outlook much (avoid Micro$oft like the plague!), but I have to use Notes at work. Notes makes it very difficult (well-nigh impossible) to properly format a reply. So I join the bandwidth-wasting crowd and do what's easiest at work.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Our company uses Outlook. Outlook has an option to include signatures in replys and forwards.
Where this gets really nasty is when (as we do), you have a company standard signature, Name, title, phone, 4 URLs, plus a 10 line legal disclaimer.
This is one of my pet peeves at work, having to scroll down 2 pages because you just got an email with....
Yes, it does
Followed by 17 lines of signature and you can't see the original message.
I think the folks at my company take themselves a little too seriously....
Learn to Improvise
Ok, this is offtopic, but I am quite sick of HTML email. My company runs Outlook/Exchange and AFAICT there's no way to tell Outlook not to render HTML in HTML emails. Emails should be plain old ASCII text with line breaks at 72 or 80 columns. If it's important that I see pretty pictures or stupid fonts, send me a URL and if it's interesting enough, I'll open it. I send everything as plain text, but of course my boss doesn't care and continues to send blue emails in Times New roman. Anyhow, it sucks, and should be abolished. Soon I shall format the mail server and show them all. Hahahahahaha!!!!!
Now that's the pot calling the kettle black. A slashdot moderator complaining that if he can't read a message without editing then he assumes that the content isn't worth his time. Cliff must have a procmail filter for CmdrTaco's emails.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
The biggest problem is many people I trade emails with have come to be used to the way that Outlook etc does things by default. I try to send proper emails(10+ Years of expirence in doing so) that have the email "properly" quoted. ie, putting my comments after each point, and I actually get yelled at for this. I even had a boss tell me to learn how to send email. Yet anothe sign of the dumbed down net.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Etc. I tried to fight this by cutting & pasting my messages so that they'd be top-quoted -- The Way The Good Lord Intended -- but it was much too much of a pain in the ass, and being the only one in the company doing it just made me look funny. Likewise my selection of a monospace font -- it was like tilting at windmills.
Yes, it's sad that not everyone has been brought into the culture in such a way that old netiquette would be honored, but that's just how it works when a subculture gets promoted to the mainstream. Yes, Microsoft could have made it easier to configure Outlook -- and to be fair, Outlook Express *is* a nice email client on the Mac (I just wasn't allowed to use it), and newer versions than this one ('98?) might be more flexible) -- and there's really no defence for their wholesale scuttling of all but their way of quoting messages. But what's done is done: as long as I can keep using Pine or Mutt, and read most of the mail coming to me, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Times have moved on...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Actually, I think that the default quoting of entire messages is a benefit. First the idea of "wasted storage" doesn't bug me. Storage is cheap these days.
What I find value in is being able to go back in the thread and see the line of discussion, and why someone is asking me a question, and from what angle they're looking at it. In other words, it gives me the background and frame of reference that makes it easier to respond. And I only have to go back as far as I need (agreed that the most relevant information is towards the top, but sometimes it can be at the very bottom -- like a Director asking a question).
Email, by far, is a 'lazy' medium. (Heck, they even have spell checkers built in.) However, there are worse ways to communicate. In the office, instant messenging has dropped to the lowest common denominator of communication. I've dropped down to using one letter replies like 'y' (yes), 'n' (no), 'k' (okay).
[nt]
If you send mail to someone perennially disorganized and they need some context for your response, you append the original message(s) (if you receive a lot of those, you can figure out yourself what it means). For a point-by-point reply, you edit in bits and pieces of their original message. And if neither of those cases applies, you don't need to quote. Now, was that so hard?
Delete everything but the exact question(s) you're responding to. The details are still available in your archive of the older mail. If you deleted that, did you really care about the details?
I have to weigh in even though this is probably redundant and going to cost me karma
:)
The current "inclusion convention" for email is just to do whatever my mail program wants, normally "stick my reply over the quoted text". This results in huge messages, often with 10 or 20 quoted messages under them which bear little or no relevance to the current line of discussion.
The end result for me is long, confusing email that eats space on my mail server (I'm an IMAP user).
In most cases I advocate the FIRST quoting style described in the jargon file - it makes the most sense for any email over 10 lines. It makes the most sense when reading over the email and it is the style I myself use. Additionally, I berate people frequently for not trimming off irrelevant stuff from their messages - If something is 6 levels back and hasn't been replied to chances are it wont spark discussion on the 7th mail.
This has been my theraputic rant for the day
/~mikeg
...was to get answers to obscure questions.
What on earth is a little bitchfest doing here? There isn't even anything to respond to in the question (besides "yes, I do quote properly" or "no, I don't quote properly.")
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Me too!
-----Original Message-----
From: cliff@slashdot.org
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 06:45:01 +0000
Subject: Quoting in Emails?
Shanes asks: "I want to know how slashdot readers feel about the IMO
ever worse quoting habits of people writing mails. When I started writing
emails to friends and colleagues over 10 years ago I and everyone else
quickly learned how to quote. These days most of the bytes in my inbox are
"Original Message" quotes that Outlook people always include at the end of
every mail. Doesn't anyone care about sending well edited mails
anymore?" I have a simple rule, if I can't read it without editing it
first, it's probably not worth my time. Do any of you get frustrated by
the formatting of email in your inbox?
Liberty in your lifetime
An example is Lotus Notes. It has lots of nifty functions, but its Reply and Forward functions leave a whole lot to be desired. To include an original message in a reply or forward, the whole thing is appended at the end, as with other text-based software. But the original is not quoted out, simply separated from the expected typing space at the top by the header. Furthermore, this header is a whitespace-heavy mess which you don't see in Lotus Notes, but can clearly see in text-based readers. Even more: you can't change your line length (fixed at 72), so you can't reduce the possibility of mis-wrapped text.
To avoid creating unnecessarily large reply messages, I'll just copy the whole message to the clipboard, and add all the quote prefixes. It's a lot of work, so maybe it's a good thing: it encourages me, and conscientious writers, to trim posts heavily. Unfortunately, it really encourages huge messages or messages with no quoted text at all!
In all, it makes me embarrassed to reply to people who are not using Lotus Notes.
Awesome!
Right a filter that automatically inserts somethign like "That's my fault, sorry" every now and then in the text, obviously not in your quotes, possibly recognizing certain templates.
That's the best laugh I've had all day.
I agree, that's it's good etiquette to not chain-quote, but really, most users can't be expected to follow old rules like that..
old? yes.
from the site:
> I have a 10 Gig disk - don't you?
Let's face it. Email etiquette is a niche. Same as websites that don't require graphics and/or plugins and/or javascript are a niche.
Some days it bugs me. Some days I don't care about it. This is not your father's "net" (-:
Let's face it. Email etiquette is a niche.
One could make the same argument about any etiquette. And in some cases, like proper pinky placement while tea-sipping, the etiquette really is a niche, because the etiquette goes with something that is itself a niche. But that's not the case with email, which is rapidly becoming universal.
Any reasonable etiquette standard, from editing your email to not using your cellphone during a movie to not slurping your soup, is about consideration for others, about trading a little effort on your part for some benefit to those you deal with. To develop a taste for manners, all you need is the chance to regularly experience both sides of the behavior. A daily shower seems like an unnecessary nuisance until you sit next to somebody who bathes monthly.
Ever since the September that never ended, the Internet has been flooded with relative newbies. Newbies anywhere are notoriously short on manners. But the percentage of new people on the Internet has probably peaked already, so we should soon see some collective progress.
Certainly, I've seen signs of it. I've stopped receiving "send a card to tumorous Timmy" forward hoaxes; all my correspondents have passed that stage. And I've seen progress in the real world, too; during the last three movies I've attended, I haven't had to kill a single person for cellphone use.
And so it will go with quoting. A well-formatted message is more pleasant to read and easier to understand; those who want to communicate well will take the extra time. And those who don't catch on will look like dolts.
What bothers me is that you can only change this on a person-by-person basis. You can set YOUR default email formatting to plaintext, but when someone sends you an email in RTF or HTML, and you reply to it, your REPLY is in RTF or HTML. You then have to change to plaintext, and blow by a dialog box to do so.
Just sad.
I too wish that there was on option in Outlook to only view messages as plaintext. If that means that all HTML tags are printed, so be it.
I like music
Nope. At least, none that I could find.
I've been using Evolution to read mail off our Exchange server using IMAP for a while now. Aside from a couple of annoying things (I can't figure out how to include the IMAP inbox [and all subordinate folders] in the Summary window, it only uses its own inbox) it works very well. Also, there's no good taskbar mailchecker, they'll check /inbox, but if I have exchange filtering my mail, it won't show me if a message arrives in a subordinate folder, hence much window switching to check my mail. This usually causes me to run Outlook on my Windows machine.
One could also use Mutt with IMAP if your exchange admins will allow IMAP.
xrayspx
Patiently waiting for Pronto! IMAP support.
I like music
This is how the organization worked and it wasn't my place to change their ways.
Now if they wanted to hire me permanently, and I had the patience to carve out a niche in which my more oldschool ways would work, that might be one thing. But I lacked the time and I lacked the will, and I would suggest that most people don't have the time or will to change something like this. If that's how the organization has chosen to work, then you really have little choice but to go along with it or work towards slow, stubbornly resisted change. C'est la vie...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I'd like to disagree -- the person probably does *not* remember exactly what they wrote. At least that's the way it is with me, and when someone replies with something like "Yes, I think you were right", I usually don't know what I had originally said.
Trimming too much is bad for comprehension; you should keep enough quoted material to establish context, IMO.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
re:
.doc files. (and also having CVS auto-update on commit every document onto an internal web server so that everybody has easy access to the current committed docs. (this is still a work in progress, so maybe I'll make a mini-howto of the system one day to explain how easy it is to set up))
> They're:
> | Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> | \--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> | \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> | \--| Foo (was: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa)
> | \-- Re: Foo
> \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
This highlights the problem that Email is not really the best medium for threaded discussions involving more than two people, whereas news groups are designed with exactly this in mind.
However convincing people to actually _use_ news groups is very difficult, as people don't seem to have the client software (well, for windows users Outlook Express is O.K, but for corporate users, there is no real integration of news groups in Outlook), specifically ones that give notifications of new messages arriving in threads of interest in the same way as Email notifications work.
In my previous job I tried very hard to encourage people to use internal news groups, especially for those "has anybody (fwd'd to 10 people) got any comments on this 30 page document" type messages, with not much success (not total failure, but not much success either: bizarrely the one area where it did work was in a group for each person to submit a weekly status report, even though they stimulated very little (or no) correspondance)
As an aside, the next problem after that for that case is actually getting authors to make the corrections that are suggested, my only solution to which has been to force people to put documents in CVS instead, prefereably as HTML, rather than binary /
Other than that, the only other problem with using news groups that I can think of is that the users cannot select an arbitrary list of receipients (it is fixed on a per-group basis, making administration a bit awkward)
Edmund.
Sorry about all the parenthesis, I fear I have a hidden desire for Lisp.
> The worst has to be when you send a long email to somebody, and it makes it way back to you with the original message and "YES!!!!!!!!" at the top
No, worse than that is when you get a digest of a mailing list, which includes full quoting *seven* levels deep (and six, and five, and four (the three, two and one level mails being in the previous digest)), every one of them incuding the signature automatically added by the list manager say "please remember to trim quoted text".
And worse than that is over 300 lines of Word generated style sheet in a mangled HTMLized mail to say "Me too" (plus full quote). And when you complain someone else says "I don't see that here, the problem must be your mail client reading it".
rant
Sometimes I wonder what will become of us bald apes. It seems to me, from observation, that most of us are almost hardwired to be selfish and to cling to our ignorance and parochialism as if they were virtues.