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?
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
Full ACK, in Outlook it is at least possible to write in a good style ('though you generally go through a lot of pain to be able to do so), but in Notes it is just not possible (at least I haven't found a sane way to do it, after I've used it for 3 years). ...
I see the entire topic mainly from an Usenet-Perspective. Usenet is a bit better in this respect. The three groups I read frequently have almost consistent quoting style, others I read every now and then have not so great, but still good quoting habbits. It seems that the more technical a discussion gets, the better the quoting gets.
And should you ever read the LKML archive you'll find that although you'll find 'Outlook default quotings' none of the gurus use it