Message Reply with quotation

[Fred Cisin]

On Wed, 21 Mar 2018, GerardCJAT via cctalk wrote:
> It seems that YOU can reply to cctech message(s) with "quoting" the answered message.
> How do you do that ???

First, are you doing a "REPLY", or a "create"/"Compose" new message?

If you are doing a "REPLY", then you need to either reconfigure your email 
client program to a different configuration to include message being 
replied to, OR reconfigure your computer for a different email client.

In the days when computers were REAL computers, email "client" programs 
defaulted to "quoting" and including the message being replied to.


Unfortunately, that led to lazy people quoting the message, which quoted 
the previous message, which quoted the previous message, back through 
topic drift to include massive amounts of grossly irrelevant material.

You had to scroll past the history of the world to get to the new message.

The answer is to teach the lUsers to delete the irrelevant portions of the 
past messages, and trim the quoted content back to only what was needed 
to provide context.

"teach people"??!?   canonical example of exercise in futility!

Rather than teach people, the makers of the email clients started to put 
the new content BEFORE the history of the world.  Called "top posting".
It's like a world of adolescents who don't wash their dishes, and end up 
using paper plates because every dish is dirty, and piled in the sink.
Rather than try to get people to do it right, many "modern" mail clients 
include the history of the world, but hide it from view when reading mail.
A short response, or even a "Me, too" is many KB or even MB long!

It is further complicated by the advent of "multimedia", where form is 
higher priority than content.  "Modern" email is more concerned with 
delivering the massage with "dancing kangaroos and yodelling jellyfish" 
than what the message says.  "The medium is the massage"?
In order to facilitate the latest multimedia silliness, with 
smell-o-vision, dancing kangaroos, and yodelling jellyfish, "modern" email 
clients encourage sending executable content with the email.  Including 
Trojan Horses with cryptolocker, etc.


On THIS list, we are lovers of the classics, and we cling to the concept 
that people CAN be taught to do things right, and even wash their dishes.
We never leave untrimmed quoted content (well, hardly ever), and we bottom 
post.  No attachments.  You can post a link to content that won't render 
in ASCII.  (we are, however, updated enough to be using ASCII, instead of 
Murray/Baudot)

I guess that we prefer "the good old days".  If John Titor is reading 
this, my offer still stands: I will come up with a 5100, with both APL AND 
BASIC, and set up a foundation to fund the entire project, in exchange for 
a ONE-WAY ride back 55 years.  Round-trip only warrants a contribution 
towards a 5100.


--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com