Ahhh. So the brokenness lies in the lack of quotation definers and the implicit one line open (BTW, pine/pico leaves two, but angle-brackets things in pretty well). I just figured that the brokenness was an artifact of where the cursor gets put, not having dealt with Lookout (personal reasons, I know of the guy who wrote it and have nothing good to say about him--if I was stuck in windoze, I'd prolly use a third party app). So the top-posting coupled with the microso~1 stuff is really a no-op, since the non-quotation quotation can be dealt with in the process of editing, since a bottom poster has to cursor through the old message, there should be no problem adding in an angle-bracket on every line. Perhaps in light of arguements like this, where the other side gets demonized by micros~1 unfairly, there ought to be the Debian equivalent of Godwin's razor: Since micros~1 is the functional equivalent of Nazis in Debian, it follows that for uses inside Debian, that Godwin's razor cuts on mentions of micros~1...
On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, Craig Dickson wrote: >John Galt wrote: >> Elm predates any microsoft email product... Try to quote stuff in elm, >> the cursor goes to the beginning of the text. > >Where the cursor starts out is beside the point. What matters is the >structure of the message. Most traditional Internet email clients, such >as elm or mutt, give you a document like this: > >___cut_here___ >John Galt wrote: >> Elm predates any microsoft email product... Try to quote stuff in elm, >> the cursor goes to the beginning of the text. > >___cut_here___ > >The use of angle-bracket quote marks on the left margin makes it easy to >tell what text is new and what is quoted, facilitating proper replies. >Moving the cursor to the bottom is trivial, and I think it's best that >the client not do that automatically, as it would discourage the user >from cutting out irrelevant material from the quoted message. (In fact, >it is easily observed that most people who reply at the top fail to trim >the quoted text.) > >Microsoft's mail clients, on the other hand, give you something like this: > >___cut_here___ > > >--- Original message --- >From: John Galt > >Elm predates any microsoft email product... Try to quote stuff in elm, >the cursor goes to the beginning of the text. >___cut_here___ > >Note that they provide no left-margin quote marks, nor any indication of >where the original message ends, and they leave a blank line or two at >the top, implying that your reply should go there (otherwise, why put >it there?). > >Craig > > > -- EMACS == Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping Who is John Galt? [EMAIL PROTECTED], that's who!