Re: trim your messages, please

["John S. Quarterman" <jsq@matrix.net>]

>Hello to all on the list. With a little spare time on my hands, and the
>same pet peeve that others on the list share with me, I took today's
>digest into Wordpad, and eliminated all the extraneous repeats. The
>original digest file was 90K long. With the repeats cut, it shrank to
>only 31K in length. This indicates that roughly 2/3 of the messages
>were extraneous. I was rather generous in what I left there, too, with
>some prudent cutting, it could perhaps be made even smaller. There's
>not much worse in my book than seeing page after page of the list
>beginning with ">" or even "> >> >>>", indicating a quote included in a
>quote included in a quote.

Thanks, Ken, for your comments.  I hope people will listen.

It's good to include enough quoted context so people will know what
you're posting about.

It's bad to quote everything from one or more previous messages.
Trimming is easy, as Ken noted.

There are sometimes good reasons for having nested quotes three
levels deep.  But not the whole messages, please.

And could everyone please turn off HTML and use plain text, so we
don't have to wade through two versions of each of your messages.
For how to do that, see:
 http://www.mids.org/sinclair/mail/index.html

John S. Quarterman <jsq@matrix.net>
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