[Xmca-l] Re: Email Format Conventions

[Huw Lloyd]

Testing


--LongSig


This test may be cut.


On 18 August 2014 01:57, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
>