Re: [Evolution] A Digression on Digests

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Sat, 2011-04-02 at 20:18 +1000, Peter Cave wrote:

[Entire redundant quote of digest deleted]

> I hope I am complying this time - am really unfamiliar with lists.

You're not, see below.

[...]

> Intuitively my intention would be (as in this message) to reply to the
> list but change the Subject heading to the desired message subject
> heading.

You don't appear to have understood my original post. This doesn't work.
As has been said countless times on this list (though as a newbie you
may not have seen it), threading *does not depend on the Subject*.
Standard threading uses header information to relate replies to the
messages they reply to. Changing the Subject makes absolutely no
difference.

> Whether this does what is required I do not know - and not knowing how
> such replies are handled is one of the reasons I have always responded
> at the top of the digest and usually delete everything below so as not
> to send and resend bloated messages.

You are confusing top-posting with quote trimming. Don't top-post. Do
trim quoted material to what you are actually responding to.

> Maybe this is a "Down Under" thing but most responses (95%) I would get
> to emails in this part of the world are nearly always at the top of the
> previous message as most people cant be bothered scrolling down through
> the old stuff to find a response or the email has been suitably culled
> to get rid of the unnecessary excess.

Nothing to do with Down Under. Corporate email is fixated on top-posting
as a way to record the entire history of a conversation (since no
trimming is done either). This is reinforced by email clients such as
Outlook and now many of the webmail systems including Gmail. In fact if
you use a BlackBerry it's so ingrained as to be almost impossible to
avoid (yet another reason that BBs are severely broken IMHO).

However in Internet *mailing lists* we have a different tradition, much
of it drawn from the Usenet system which was once the principal medium
for this kind of discussion. Remember that both mailing lists and Usenet
have eternal archives of everything anyone has ever said, so it's
unnecessary to quote anything except what you specifically want to
comment on. Of course most people won't follow this strictly, especially
for short messages, but use your judgment.

In brief:

* Don't *ever* quote digests.
* Don't top-post, as it makes multipart conversations harder to follow.
* Don't quote more than you need to. The whole thing is on file anyway,
so you're just using more bandwidth and storage to no purpose.

And of course, as everything is on file, you can browse the history of
this list and see how many times people have already said all this
before.

poc