Re: [Evolution] Cannot connect to Evolution with Google

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Mon, 2021-02-15 at 11:18 +1300, Kiwi Rider via evolution-list wrote:
> Patrick, while I agree that the form of quoting you prefer seems 
> naturally better, for quite some time now the form that Daniel Caron 
> used is the most common. It is absolutely irritating but you might as 
> well try to stop any of the other tides of behaviour those of us who 
> prefer the old 'hand-crafted' ways find annoying. Most people do it and 
> the few of us who normally don't are disappearing.

[...]

The top-posting form of quoting is indeed the common style, and I even
use it myself when replying to personal mails using a webmail
interface. I agree that it's impossible to change the world's bad
habits (which arose entirely because Microsoft's Not Invented Here
syndrome when they decided to "invent" email and foisted Outlook upon
the world).

Be that as it may, a mailing list is a horse of different colour. It's
a fairly small community of people with a common interest, and is
perfectly at liberty to define its own standards to try to improve
communication. A mailing list is also different from the everyday
corporate mail we are all used to, because a) everything is archived,
making it redundant to have fully quoted messages which themselves
contain fully quoted replies to previous fully quoted replies (and so
ad nauseam), and b) the list deals with a huge variety of different
topics within its general area of concern, and each of these tends to
give rise to a sometimes quite long thread of back-and-forth posts. In
these circumstances, the unselective top-posting style of replies is
entirely inappropriate. Selective quoting with inserted comments
originally evolved as the preferred style for Usenet newsgroups, and
continues to be the preferred style for technical mailing lists.

As one of the moderators of this list, I feel free to remind people of
this occasionally.

Cheers

poc