On 4 Oct 2002, David Krider wrote: >1) Why is it that some people seem to have a religious belief that you >should reply BELOW someone else's included comments? I think it's much >easier to follow a thread in an email client with a preview pane (e.g. >Evolution and Mozilla Mail) if the reply sits on top. What am I missing?
It's really personal preference ultimately. Some might say it is religious/political. When replying to a message, if you reply on top in one huge chunk, there isn't a direct corelation between your amassed comment at the top, and individual points you're responding to throughout the senders message. On the other hand, my reply right now, is responding to each of your comments one after the other. Someone reading it can see what you have said, and then following that, they see my reply. When someone else responds, it will go under what I've said. Reading the email message in normal human order, then gives the question/answer/conversation/whatever in the order in which it was written chronologically. I find reply-on-top to be quite annoying personally. I wish people who did that, would just delete the quoted message below entirely, as it usually is useless as you can't follow the context of their reply to specific points in the message following. Also, generally people who reply on top, almost never ever trim the quoted message down to minimize wasting bandwidth and cluttering up people's mailboxes. It's not uncommon to see messages from reply-on-top people with huge fully quoted email messages below which are totally unnecessary. I often just delete such messages unread. >2) Is there any way to get Evolution to drop sigs at the `--'? I noticed >for the first time just a couple weeks ago that Mozilla had been doing >this for me (while I was using KDE because I couldn't get fonts like I >wanted them in Gnome), and I've come to rely on it. Not sure, sorry.... I don't use Evolution personally. Hope this helps. Take care, TTYL P.S. Note how my answers followed your questions, making it much easier to follow the conversation in chronological order than if I had quoted your whole email and pasted my reply on top. I also have trimmed out parts of the reply which were unnecessary to keep quoted. Makes things much easier to read on mailing lists when people follow a few of these netiquette tips. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer XFree86 maintainer Red Hat Inc.
