[SLUG] Mailing Lists!

[Al Girling]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 02:08:40AM +0100, Ian Eade wrote:
 
> > On Sat, 23 Aug 2003, Mark Feather wrote:
> > 
> > > Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 18:17:01 +0100
> > > From: Mark Feather <akwe-xavante at firenet.uk.com>
> > > Reply-To: scarborough at mailman.lug.org.uk
> > > To: scarborough at mailman.lug.org.uk
> > > Subject: Re: [SLUG] Mailing Lists!
> > 
> > The one thing that annoy's me about Outlook, apart from the 
> > fact that it's buggy and help's the endless flow of viri 
> > propagate, is that it does not alway's make it apparent which 
> > part of an email is the original and which part is the reply.
> > 
> > Most mail clients put a '>' at the beginning of replied to 
> > text, as does my version of Outlook at work. Some people's 
> > version of Outlook do not seem to do this and it makes it 
> > very difficult to follow the email.

The '>' symbol used to indicate quoted text is easily changed in most
mail clients, including Outlook and Outlook Express.  What I think
you'll find is that most M$ users who prefer using HTML absolutely 
hate the '>' symbol used in plain text messages.  As well as changing 
it, you can also remove it.  Which is what I suspect these users do.

The '>' symbol is often regarded as interfering with the appearance of
mail and when they try to remove it they discover that Outlook Express
lacks even simple text editor utilities like search and replace.
Also, because of the default behaviour of OE.  It's users
automatically top post and see no benefit in a system used 
successfully for years.  Most OE users are completely unaware of an 
alternative, others fail to see the benefits of the system and carry 
on regardless.  It's all a bit of a mess but unless we try to adopt 
some guidelines chaos will ensue and people like Mark will be 
confused forever.  

> Would it be any better if there was only 1 operating system and only 1
> software manufacturer in the world?

Of course not Ian.  But the worlds biggest megalomaniac is 
advocating this, he's given us Outlook Express, and it sucks!  Of
course a lot of people don't know this because they don't know any
alternative.

But we seem to be getting to a situation were most mailing lists use 
posting in context or bottom posting.  With some people insisting on 
messing up the flow by top posting.

It's not just a case of readability either.  Because of top posting 
each mail in a thread can become huge!  People simply click on reply 
type their bit and send it off.  They don't look at the rest of the 
post to see the numerous signatures and disclaimers attached.  These 
should be trimmed off as no longer relevant.  I know some people only
receive a small amount of mail each day (I don't get a huge amount)
but some get a couple of thousand each day.  So if each mail has 100+
Kb of rubbish that should have been removed, that's an awful lot of
unnecessary text to receive.

I'm hoping to put together some guidelines to get the best from the
mailing list in the next week.  Hopefully with the help of some of the
people who thanked me for trying to get the list in some sort of
order.

Al
-- 
Al Girling			Registered Linux User: 290080
mailto:al21 at firenet.uk.com	Debian GNU/Linux