On Friday 24 February 2006 11:25, John Clarke wrote: > On Friday 24 February 2006 05:50, Heikki Pesonen wrote: > > Dear John, > > why did you copy everything to your answer (as I do here) so that we > > had to read twice the whole story to reach your kind one line long > > answer? > > <snipped so that nobody else knows what I'm talking about> :-) > > Because it is normal practice to include the question to which you are > answering. It would be meaningless to others to see a one line e mail > which contained an answer but no question.
I think we need to look at how Heikki's question was stated: He's asking why you're __ copying __ the original question, so from that I gather he's not as as familiar with mailer options as we are and well as that he's using gmail which doesn't allow too much in answering options either. > Also this list is archived and searchable, therefore at some future date > another list member might wish to search the archive and see both the > original question and the answer offered without having to follow the > thread backwards to find the question, It is sometimes considered good > practice to snip a long message which contains the original question > followed by several follow-ups although it is to the judgement of the > person replying as to where to snip the message so that the context is not > lost. It would be nice if people snipped a little more. Only recently I again saw a thread where some one had pasted his whole "dmesg" output in the message, and it kept being repeated indiscriminately. We all should be more carefull not to hi-jack or let the thread s get too long (on OT or side subjects) thus making the list-archives less usefull. Peronally I've stopped trying to search the newbie archives by subject when confronted with a problem ....... it's a disaster area. :-( -- Good luck, HarM ____________________________________________________ Want to buy your Pack or Services from Mandriva? Go to http://store.mandriva.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrivaclub.com ____________________________________________________
