Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:13:10 -0500
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] E-Mail Style (was Re: Nebulas)
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

"Keith F. Lynch" wrote:

> What I do find obnoxious are messages quoting all of the previous
> message, which in turn quotes all of yet another message.  Sometimes
> as much as seven levels deep.  Am I the only one annoyed by this?
> Or should I automatically trim quoted messages?

The problem is, IMHO, self-correcting.  People on the list can see how
unreadable some posts are, how readable some others are, and what the
differences are.  People who are posting presumably read other peoples'
posts and want other people to read theirs.

I've gotten business e-mail (from people at computer companies!) that is
far less readable than anything I've seen here.

Anyway, the "rules" for readable e-mail date from long before I started
using e-mail in 1986 or so:

1.  Text only. No graphics or fancy file formats.  No attachments.  No
MIME.

2.  Hard line breaks with a  maximum line width of 72 characters.  The
"=20"s at the end of lines are from a mail program trying to send a
paragraph as one continuous line.  Note that the result of an e-mail
program handling this "correctly" may be worse than the "=20"s -- mine
tries to scroll the whole one- line paragraph horizontally ....

3. Mark off the text that you're responding to.  The traditional way of
doing this is to start each quoted line with "> " (note the space).

4.  Trim the message you're replying to.  No need to quote the whole
thing if you're just replying to one part.  Do be sure to leave enough
for context, however.

5.  Put your response after the section of the message you're responding
to.  This lets you reply to several points in one message, without
confusing people about what you're responding to. It's useful to set off
your reply with a blank line so the original and the response don't run
together.

The first three are settings that live somewhere inside the mail
program.  The other two are just a matter of writing style.  Like I said
before, it'll settle itself out. This is, after all, a group that is
rather familiar with written English ....

Note -- anybody who needs some help finding e-mail settings, send me a
message.  I use Netscape, Outlook, and Outlook Express regularly.  (I
also use Eudora but don't have a copy easily available just now.)

--
Steve Smith                                           sgs at aginc.net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."