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List:       pine-info
Subject:    [Pine-info] Re: [Alpine-info] Reply Top Posting
From:       Lucio Chiappetti <lucio () lambrate ! inaf ! it>
Date:       2008-12-03 9:09:31
Message-ID: alpine.LSU.1.00.0812031000440.4278 () cbfrvqba ! ynzoengr ! vans ! vg
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On Tue, 2 Dec 2008, James Pittman wrote:

> Top posting no doubt came about not through ignorance or use of bad email
> clients, but because the classic way of replying to a letter using the
> postal service or a fax machine was simply transposed into email, when
> email was taken up on mass by businesses.

Sincerely I've never expected any reply to my paper correspondence to 
contain a whole copy of my original letter, ... of which I should have 
already kept a copy in my archive, were it important enough.

What annoys me most in top (or bottom, but unsnipped) posting is the fact 
every new message is including all previous messages which are ALREADY 
archived in my folders ... and of which I DO NOT need any duplicate ... so 
in fact I have a procmail recipe which gets rid of that useless crap.

Including entire messages in a reply makes sense when FORWARDING a 
correspondence threads to somebody who was not involved at the beginning.

However there is a better way to do that, without annoying the original 
participants. That is, sending to the new person (and eventually cc: to 
the other participants) a short message telling him that he (only) will 
receive a copy of the previous correspondence.

Which in (al)pine can be nicely generated selecting individual messages, 
and then doing Apply Forward ... and replying Yes to the question whether 
one wants to send as a MIME digest.

If the other guy has also (al)pine there are tricks (which were mentioned 
on this list) to expand a MIME digest in a mail folder. I do not know 
about other MUAs.

-- 
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
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