[thelist] Netiquette: quoting selectively

Madhu Menon webguru at vsnl.net
Fri Oct 12 16:21:59 CDT 2001


I'm on the digest mode of thelist, and one thing that really gets my goat 
is when people just quote the entire message without taking the time to 
trim their posts. Some recent messages have been of this format:

[one line reply to post]

[20 lines of previous message quoted]

[10 lines of the message that the previous message quoted]


That's 31 lines for what's a 1 line post. Not required at all.

Please... quote only the parts that you're replying to. Save bandwidth. But 
more importantly, save the list members a lot of irritation.

Since Outlook is the major culprit in this (it doesn't use the "quote" 
character by default), a tip is required.

<tip type="Configuring MS Outlook to use the quote character" author="Madhu 
Menon">


It *is* possible to configure Outlook to use the ">" for quoted text. 
Here's how to do it:

1) Go to Tools > Options. On the Preferences tab, click on "Email Options"

2) There's a dropdown called "When replying to a message". From that, 
select "Prefix each line of the original message". There's also an edit box 
labelled "Prefix each line with" By default, it's ">"

3) Also click on the Mail Delivery tab and make sure that the message 
format is sent to plain text.

4) Click OK.

</tip>

I recommend reading Matt Haughey's article on mailing list ettiquette at:
<http://www.digital-web.com/tutorials/tutorial_1999-12.shtml>

Netiquette is a wonderful thing :)

Cheers,

Madhu
(sorry if I came across sounding like djc :P )

<<<   *   >>>
Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net

Weblog: http://madman.weblogs.com





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