Re: [gentoo-user] Time to move on?

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 March 2009 16:54:21 Momesso Andrea wrote:
>> Unfortunatly my BlackBerry doesn't allow bottom posting. I hope you guys
>> forgive me for the few times I answer on this list using my mobile
>> device.
>
> What? There's no down arrow on a BlackBerry?
>
> I don't have one of those devices, and fully intend to never have one, so if
> there's a stupid implementation of the reply function, I'd never know it. But
> just asking, that's all.

There are many devices and webmail services that do quoting in the
"Microsoft Outlook" style -- putting a one-line divider between the
reply and the original message. No indentation or nesting of replies.
This makes it harder to reply to specific parts of e-mails, but does
show you the entire conversation unaltered (when everyone uses
Outlook, anyway) -- and some companies actually /require/ that style
of quoting, believe it or not.

Replying to specific parts of an e-mail in Outlook (etc) is usually a
joke. People resort to strange combinations of colorizing, changing
fonts, emboldening, italicizing, etc. All of it is hideous and was
solved 30 years ago by simple indentation and nesting of quotes...
Thanks a lot, Microsoft.

I use gmail for this and other mailing lists; it collapses quoted text
and shows e-mails in a conversational view. It really does a good job
of it and the top-posting and quoting-of-entire-emails really becomes
a non-issue. It's the next best thing to having everyone quote
properly.