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Trimming messages
Jim Slade mentioned the other day that
when people reply. “What
I'm getting is a rerun of the entire conversation every time another person
replies to it..over and over again.”
That’s not due to hitting <Reply>
instead of <Reply All>. Rather, it is because most e-mail programs copy
the entire message to which you are replying into the reply your are
writing. Sometimes the old text is above your new writing, sometimes
below your new writing.
And, after the conversation has gone on
for a while, you can get 3, 5 15 messages all included in EVERY message.
It IS a problem – both in just
FINDING the new text and in the wasted transmission time and storage.
Since it is pretty easy to go back and
look at the discussion thread, most list managers are now asking people to TURN
OFF that automatic copying of the old message. If you keep the old
messages yourself or use the archives, you can look back at old messages if you
need to. Also, it’s reasonable to quote enough of the previous
message(s) so people know what you’re talking about – like I did in
the first paragraph.
How to:
Various programs turn off this quoting in
different ways. In most, you would look across the top menu toolbar,
pausing your mouse on each item and look for <options> or sometimes
<preferences> in the dropdown menus.
If you DO want to quote someone else’s
text, you can do that pretty easily by highlighting the text you want with your
mouse holding down the mouse button while you sweep the desired text.
Then you click on <edit> and <copy> or type <cntl-C> to
copy that text into the clipboard. Next, you place your mouse in your new
message in the place you want it and either click on <edit> and
<paste> or just press <cntl-V>.
A second option I tried for a while was to
let the autocopy do its thing, then every time delete the unneeded text.
But I found that to be more fuss. I found out I rarely need to copy much
text and very often didn’t need to copy ANY of the preceding message.
So, please, all, turn off that automatic
copying of the preceding message OR manually delete most or all of the preceding
message before you send your reply.
Thanks to everyone for your help.
http://edburkhead.com
ed -at-
edburkhead???.com (change
-at- to @ and remove "???")
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