From: "Matthias Paul" 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany eMail: Web : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html -------------------------------------------------------------------