making email easier to read

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 08:23:45PM -0400, Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> Businesses tend to take opposite position (and they even ask sometime to 
> quote entire message). Why? Because that helps them to keep the track of 
> what the problem is about.

Business email is one thing.  Mailing lists are something very
different.  Don't try to apply the same rules to them.  It is
unfortunate many GUI email clients insist on doing the business style
and in some cases make it a hassle to do it any other way.

Of course you are just too darn lazy if you can't move your cursor.  If
your email client doesn't do decent quoting with some kind of indent
marker at all, then it's time to ditch the useless program for something
better.

> In the past I would ask the same as you did. Now, I find sometime 
> convenient (and even desirable) to respond "before" the message 
> quatation. I do not care anymore is the quatation before or after the 
> response. Which way is better depands sometime on circumstances.

Well many mailing lists consider top posting very bad edicate.  If you
are doing messages between people at work on the other hand it is often
prefered.

> I am stroongly against for using HTML on mailing lists or private 
> correspondence. This is simply plain silly. Allow however spammers to 
> use HTML and Windows users, please ;)
> 
> Regarding spammers - this is a separate topic. Not a something easy or 
> straightforward.
> 
> Now, however most people do not care about line widths because they use 
>  GUI for emailing. I do support though the idea of taking care of line 
> widths. People sometime do not imagine how huge mess they create by not 
> taking care of line widths.

I don't use a graphical client, and even if I did, I might prefer the
lines not go on forever (might have to keep turning my head back and
forth to read them then and it makes it hard to read fast, and don't
tell me I should just resize the window to fix that).

> BTW, the way mail is formated is determined by preferencial settings in 
> email client. Most of people would never think that they could change 
> these settings ;) I bet there are such people on this list as well ;) 
> So, if they use Outlook, Microsoft will set preferences for them. And 
> some writing here do use Outlook, dont they? ;)

Probably very few.  And most who do have figured out plain text setting,
or been told how to figure it out.

Lennart Sorensen
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