Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 13:49:49 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Different subject now, you have been warned! [was: Re: [WSFA] Re: Has anyone read any good books lately?]
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

At 12:30 PM 3/28/05 -0500, Ted White wrote:
>From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>

>> quoted text, and doesn't, by default, do the standard ">" indenting of
>>the quoted text.
>
>Funny; mine does do "the standard '>' indenting of the quoted text," as my
>posts make obvious.

I didn't say it couldn't do it.  I said it didn't do it by default.  For my
work system I had to change the default behavior to get it to do that.
Most people either don't bother or don't know how.

It's like the HTML posting thing...you can turn it off, but you have to
know how.   If you are going through an Exchange server (Micro$oft's mail
server product), that might override what you specify anyway...we just had
that problem at work with a newly installed Exchange server where all the
defaults were screwed up and made us look bad to our customers until we got
it changed in the same way the old one had been.

I suppose it's possible that different versions of Outlook! have different
defaults.  The one I use for work is Outlook 98 (version 8.5).  By default
it comes set to send HTML messages with color and fonts used to specify
quoting in top posting format.  You can change the HTML setting and get it
to indent with ">" if you know where to look, but there doesn't seem to be
any way to specify internet standard format for the message as a
whole...that you have to do manually on every message by removing the
header stuff it puts in.  Or just leave it there, as you do and let others
remove it when they reply.

It shouldn't be hard for M$ to put in a simple check box option for
"internet standard format" and have that change everything to work that way
in one simple setting under "options".  That they don't do this indicates
to me that they are trying to force their way of doing things on an
established culture.  All they end up doing is causing problems far and wide.

-- Mike B.
--
Gettin' clear o' dirtiness, gettin' shut o' mess.  Gettin' done wi' doin'
things rather more or less!