[GTALUG] email etiquette.

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>

| Personally, I usually delete if I don't see poster's writing in first
| screen.  Of course, with exception.  I know Hugh always bottom post, so
| I hold off delete to 3rd screen.

That's kind.  But what kind of screen do you have?  Of the almost 2000
posts I've made to the lists since October 1999, only 11 have had more
than 24 non-header lines before the first line that matched this
pattern: '^[^|]'.  Do you have less than 12 lines on your screen?

Perhaps you use a GUI MUA that squanders screen space.

I created an mbox file with the postings.  I called it 99.  Then I ran:

	<99 formail +1 -I "" -s grep -m 1 -n '^[^|]' \
	| sed -e 's/:.*//' 999 | sort -n | uniq -c

This gave me a histogram of lengths.

For technical reasons, you need to subtract two from each of the
lengths.  So the length "2" is for messages with no initial quoting.

When I quote, I generally leave a blank line before my response.  So how 
could there be messages with "3" as a length?  In both those cases I 
accidentally started my message with an extra blank line (no quote).

    512 2
      2 3
     74 4
     13 5
    186 6
    300 7
    219 8
    148 9
    134 10
    100 11
     68 12
     44 13
     41 14
     28 15
     22 16
     24 17
      6 18
     14 19
      4 20
      4 21
      7 22
      5 23
      4 24
      3 25
      2 26
      4 27
      1 29
      1 30
      3 31

My mail-reading window normally is tall enough that in every case, some of 
the actual content would show on the first page.  For example, it is now 
89 lines (not set for this message).  My monitor allows 124 lines.  All 
this with the default Gnome Terminal font.