[Xmca-l] Re: Email Format Conventions

[Andy Blunden]

Or just sort your messages in subject/date order and read each message 
in whatever order you like. ... except for people like Huw who embed 
their replies. :)
But in any case, it is nothing to do with xmca.
Some messages put coloured lines on the left, some put grey lines on the 
left and some put >s on the left. It is hard to tell by looking, but I 
think it is the email client of the first responder which formats the 
next layer of indenting, resulting in mixtures of the 3 different modes 
in any given message on occasion.

Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


Huw Lloyd wrote:
> On 17 August 2014 19:20, David H Kirshner <dkirsh@lsu.edu> wrote:
>
>   
>> David,
>> Thanks for your insightful post.
>> In scrolling down below your message, to recover the context, I was
>> faced--as all of us so often are--with the garbling effect that comes from
>> use of the ">" program that separates out the various generations of
>> response by inserting a new level of ">" for each new message.
>> That formatting option may serve a valuable function in case two or more
>> authors are replying to each other with comments embedded in the prior
>> text. But that kind of communicative format is not used very frequently,
>> and even when it is, the line-break function of the program tends to
>> fragment sentences to the point of incoherence (see below).
>>
>>     
>
> Hi David,
>
> Actually embedded replies are used frequently and productively in many
> technical arenas!
>
>
>   
>> I suspect this format continues to be in popular use because people who
>> use it feel a sense of comfort with the tradition of usage that trumps
>> functionality concerns, or perhaps they just don't know how to change
>> formats.
>> Are there other reasons?
>>
>>     
>
> The email software conventions programmed into email clients (applications)
> indent the content of email that is replied to.  Overriding this by not
> indenting old text would be unusual.
>
> Text formats etc are usually filterable by the mail server.  Additionally
> the mail server can also perform simple functions such as cutting all text
> below a specially marked piece of text (e.g:
> http://www.redmine.org/issues/4409) to help prevent very long trailing
> messages.
>
> Best,
> Huw
>
>