From:	"Matthias Paul" <PAUL-MA AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Organization:	Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen
To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
Date:	Mon, 10 Jul 2000 18:05:46 +0100
Subject:	Re: quoting and listening
X-mailer:	Pegasus Mail v3.22
Message-ID:	<955A3D7BC0@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de>
Reply-To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com

Hi,

I'd like to suggest to add a carriage return/linefeed every 75 chars 
or so, since most non-windowing emailers do not flood-fill the text, 
and you always have to scroll right/left when reading such emails. 
Some emailer like for example the popular PMAIL for DOS do not allow 
to show lines with more than 255 chars (since PMAIL was written in 
Pascal), and you always have to export an email, quit the emailer, 
and fire up another editor to read such emails. Not very convenient...

Speaking of quoting and listening, I think (interim) quoting is useful 
and necessary for a discussion (at least for the majority of us who 
are used to "think" visually - as we all know, some level of 
redundancy is necessary to properly transport information in a 
message), however, I agree with Jim in so far, that sometimes the 
quoted excerpts are too long. Maybe this mainly addresses our 
youngsters, but anyway: Except for correspondence with corporate 
hotlines and the like rare occasions, it is contra-productive 
to quote whole postings (or even threads), just adding three words - 
no matter if adding them at the beginning or the end.
It's just careless and ignorant, and usually recognized as impolite, 
and I more and more tend to ignore such emails (like emails sent 
as .HTML, .DOC or .RTF - fortunately not in this list).
(However, we can call ourselfs happy, when comparing this 
mailing list's habbits with habbits in other forums - including 
the FreeDOS mailing list, which IMHO unfortunately has a very low 
signal to noise ratio due to extremely redundant quoting - something 
that keeps me from actively joining their discussions). My motivation 
to participate in mailing lists like this is for knowledge exchange 
and mutual support, and not to waste time for converting/skipping 
duplicate emails etc.

Well, probably too much said regarding this subject already...

 Matthias
 
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Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany
eMail: <Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Web  : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html
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