Randy, This has been a sore point from two opposite extremes and hotly debated by two camps.
One camp would like to see the messages quote just the relevant post being replied to, and have a string of individual posts/emails for the thread. This would be the normal behavior of a forum. The other camp are the ones who receive individual emails and would like the entire tread to be in the last email so they can delete every email that came before without losing anything. This makes for a nice archive that can be organized and searched easily on the local machine. Interesting posts saved for future reference can be flagged, and irrelevant ones deleted. It is a nice model. I thought I was in the second camp until I discovered that the model is broken in another way besides the line wrap issue. At least with the line wrap, all the data is still there --even if it takes a lot of work to read it. The problem is that even if everyone was respecting the desire to include the whole thread, posts are still left out. This happens when someone makes a post and two or three people reply to it. Each reply might include the previous rest of the thread, but not the other two replies because they have not been seen yet. This happens on almost every thread. The thread branches and can not be put back in sequence without hand editing. The thread usually just falls apart at that point and can no longer be saved as a single email message. Because of this, I rethought my position on this issue and this is one more reason I lean towards a PHP forum now. There are other tools one can use if they really want to be able to capture posts into a local database. I am about fixing problems rather than living with them if I have an option. Best regards, Dennis On Aug 29, 2008, at 10:52 PM, Randy Harmelink wrote: > I would say the problem is that people aren't trimming posts enough. > There's no reason to have the entire previous thread repeated in each > successive message. The details can always be retrieved from the > website if necessary. All that needs to be quoted is enough to give a > reply some context and relevance. > > But you're right -- different email clients can muck up the messages > in different ways, especially if someone defaults to HTML or rich > format when there isn't a need for it. > > On 8/29/08, Dennis Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> IMHO, technically speaking only, there is one thing that is terribly >> broke with the current email option. I do not know the exact >> circumstances, but I will describe it and see if you see the same >> thing. Many posts look just fine back through the nested replies. >> However, at some point, someone will reply and hard line breaks will >> be inserted into everything. The first time this happens it does not >> look too bad. However, the next time it happens, it breaks the >> previous indented lines all the way back to the first message in such >> a way that everything before the last reply is almost impossible to >> read. Successive replies through such a system make this even worse. >
