I don't remember now who it was that was trying to write a 'how to use mail' document for their users, but I have a suggestion.
A lot of the time, what you really want is to get rid of all of the quoted material altogether. A bit of usenet history is of interest here. In the very old days, we didn't have a way to quote any mail at all. We didn't have threads, either. A small number of people could not, therefore be held accountable for what they had actually said, as they kept saying that what they had said was something different. So you would get a hold of the old piece of mail, yank out the appropriate text, and say -- look here, you cannot hide, this is what you said and here it is! This happened often enough that several of us decided that it would be a good idea to put quoting into the mail and news readers we were using at the time. And I am one of the people who did so. And it made certain things infinitely more convenient. And this turned out to be a mixed blessing. Whereas before people would say: XXX has made a series of interesting proposals, but he has misunderstood RFC Blah Blah Blah where we are mandated to do This_Thing and provide Obnoxious_Headers X Y and Z. So all of his proposals are moot unless we can get a new RFC to supercede Blah Blah Blah, with quoting it became all too easy to rip XXXs proposal to shreds, point by point, instead of just nailing it once, on the main point. The problem with the approach is that, for poor old XXX the effect went from 'you need to read RFC Blah Blah Blah again, because you have misunderstood it -- or didn't know that it existed and was relevant' to You're Wrong. and You're Wrong here as well. And here. And here. Because you are an Idiot. This sort of point-by-point dressing down really had only one counterpart in face-to-face communication -- where a Superior dresses down a Subordinate, in front of an audience. The main purpose of such things has nothing to do with the Subordinate that got the dressing down, but everything to do with maintaining the Superior's authority and making the audience quiver in their boots (while thanking God that they weren't getting the chewing out). So, unsurprisingly, people who had made tiny errors in understanding or interpretation flipped right out at what they perceived as bucket-loads of nitpicking contempt hurled at them for no particularly good reason, by a person whose authority they didn't recognise. It was also widely condemned as a way to impose a hierarchical structure on something that had hitherto been working in a rather flat, equalitarian manner. And it had a chilling effect on whether people who were young, new and trying to learn things were willing to post their current thoughts on a matter. On several mailing lists I have been members of for years civility only returned when we point blank banned this form of point by point rebuttal. So, if you are writing such a document, insist that people understand that they only have to win an argument once. There are no bonus points awarded for overkill. :) Laura Creighton ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org