Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

Quoting in Emails? 61

Posted by Cliff from the I'm-more-sick-of-HTML-in-my-email dept.
Shanes asks: "I want to know how slashdot readers feel about the IMO ever worse quoting habits of people writing mails. When I started writing emails to friends and colleagues over 10 years ago I and everyone else quickly learned how to quote. These days most of the bytes in my inbox are "Original Message" quotes that Outlook people always include at the end of every mail. Doesn't anyone care about sending well edited mails anymore?" I have a simple rule, if I can't read it without editing it first, it's probably not worth my time. Do any of you get frustrated by the formatting of email in your inbox?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Quoting in Emails? More

Quoting in Emails?

Comments Filter:
  • Do any of you get frustrated by the formatting of email in your inbox?

    No.

    Our whole company uses outlook. Everybody uses the default quoting system


    Yes, they do.

    --- original message ---
    from : Bob
    subject : v. important

    Do the widgets work?

    -- original message --
    from : Boris
    subject : v.important

    Got any questions about the widgets?



    That works for me

    1) The most important information is at the top.

    2) I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion.

    • Re:Sorry, but no. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kilrogg ( 119108 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @03:00AM (#2840581) Homepage
      The most important information is at the top.

      Sure, if your emails are only one sentence long this method works great but if your replying to mutliple questions/points/etc, quoting parts and replying to each works much better.

      Judging by the use of quotes here, most slashdot readers agree with me.

      2) I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion.

      Sure, if your only interacting if one other person, but what if two people reply to you at the same time?

    • Re:Sorry, but no. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by abombss ( 546844 )

      [Why Default Outlook Reply is Good]
      &gt I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion.

      I would have to disagree with your point #2. Our whole office uses the Outlook and the majority of them use the default reply method ( 99.9 % ). The biggest complaint I have is when I am forwarded or copied on an email discussion after several emails have been sent. I am forced to scroll through 5 to 10 pages of pure crap and headers trying to figure what the heck the whole thing is about.

      For lengthy emails I generally use many of the practices outlined in the article, but I do have to confess for short communications between only one person I use the default the method. I can also say that I have been complimented on a reply that I took the time edit and breakdown in a very concise manner. So people do pay attention to this point.

    • Re:Sorry, but no. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Wolfger ( 96957 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @06:38AM (#2841075)
      2) I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion. Do I work with you? If so, let me know. I would have lots of fun editing the older portions of quoted text (I'm sure you don't read the full history of every message), rendering your single-message archive humorously useless! (or, if you get on my bad side, I could subtly alter the history of our conversation so that blame for project failure falls squarely on your shoulders...) Single message archiving only works if you can trust the person you're conversing with. That's fairly rare in a business environment.
      • Single message archiving only works if you can trust the person you're conversing with.

        Or if you can trust that the person you're conversiong don't even know that they could edit this 'single message archive', which is fairly rare with ppl who don't know how to quote.

      • Whoa! I can edit the quoted part! THAT'S AWESOME!

        Yours truly,
        L.E.T. Hacker, MSCE
    • 2) I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion.

      Well posted email, threaded properly is much better and historically accurate then one single message. Go the step further, digitally sign your documents, then you will have the best, most usable archive.

      just my .02

    • Re:Sorry, but no. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Fweeky ( 41046 )

      Uhm, I hit the lameness filter on a simple HTML formatted message for the sake of an example list? WTF is the point of allowing HTML if you filter like that? Especially when it allows this mess of  's, pipes and hyphens. Sigh

      1) The most important information is at the top.

      Except it has no frame of reference; to find out what you're replying to you have to jump to the bottom and find the reply, read it, work out what specific part you're replying to and then read your response again.

      2) I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion.

      Um, no you can't. Threads aren't usually like:

      | Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
      \--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
      \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa

      They're:

      | Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
      |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
      |\--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
      |\-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
      |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
      |\--| Foo (was: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa)
      |\-- Re: Foo
      \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa

      How do ypu propose to archive all those with a single message, even assuming you can trust every user to use the same reply method and not ever even concider changing anything?

      The standard method of quoting; i.e, quoting as little as needed, replying in-context etc, results in shorter more structured messages that are easier to read and contain a minimum of redundant data. It also scales much better; when you're 20 replies deep in a thread, where your messages are hitting 200k with every previous message still in there, proper quoting is still just leaving the relevent information in there.

      If you need to archive threads, you should save the entire thread out to an mbox, not pick one untrusted message and hope the thread is structured enough to all be contained in it.

      • re:
        > They're:
        > | Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
        > |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
        > | \--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
        > | \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
        > |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
        > | \--| Foo (was: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa)
        > | \-- Re: Foo
        > \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa

        This highlights the problem that Email is not really the best medium for threaded discussions involving more than two people, whereas news groups are designed with exactly this in mind.

        However convincing people to actually _use_ news groups is very difficult, as people don't seem to have the client software (well, for windows users Outlook Express is O.K, but for corporate users, there is no real integration of news groups in Outlook), specifically ones that give notifications of new messages arriving in threads of interest in the same way as Email notifications work.
        In my previous job I tried very hard to encourage people to use internal news groups, especially for those "has anybody (fwd'd to 10 people) got any comments on this 30 page document" type messages, with not much success (not total failure, but not much success either: bizarrely the one area where it did work was in a group for each person to submit a weekly status report, even though they stimulated very little (or no) correspondance)

        As an aside, the next problem after that for that case is actually getting authors to make the corrections that are suggested, my only solution to which has been to force people to put documents in CVS instead, prefereably as HTML, rather than binary / .doc files. (and also having CVS auto-update on commit every document onto an internal web server so that everybody has easy access to the current committed docs. (this is still a work in progress, so maybe I'll make a mini-howto of the system one day to explain how easy it is to set up))

        Other than that, the only other problem with using news groups that I can think of is that the users cannot select an arbitrary list of receipients (it is fixed on a per-group basis, making administration a bit awkward)

        Edmund.

        Sorry about all the parenthesis, I fear I have a hidden desire for Lisp.
        • > This highlights the problem that Email is not
          > really the best medium for threaded discussions
          > involving more than two people, whereas news
          > groups are designed with exactly this in mind.

          Mailing lists are fine, aside from being more complex to join/leave. Mass-Ccing and group replies are also handy for small discussions between a few people, but you're right; for internal stuff, a private news setup's a good alternative. I have always been surprised at the lack of good Win32 news software to the tune of NewsRog though.

          Mixing the two might be the best compromise; have a news server for those who want to use it, and have a mail news gateway with a list.

          > As an aside, the next problem after that for
          > that case is actually getting authors to make
          > the corrections that are suggested, my only
          > solution to which has been to force people to
          > put documents in CVS instead, prefereably as
          > HTML, rather than binary / .doc files.

          WebDAV/SubVersion might be a good way to go in future, especially since you can mount WebDAV shares directly in Explorer (I gather Macs have good WebDAV support too).

          HTML, though, *cringe*, make them use a proper descriptive XML format that you can turn into anything with a quick XSL :)
  • I routinely get emails from people who should know better that are 98% words that I wrote to them. Is it really so hard to snip the original message? The person probably remembers what they wrote. I am personally at a loss to understand how people think it is acceptable to send back the whole message when you don't need to quote it or show context.

    The worst has to be when you send a long email to somebody, and it makes it way back to you with the original message and "YES!!!!!!!!" at the top, but let's not talk about top-posting in email.

    • The worst has to be when you send a long email to somebody, and it makes it way back to you with the original message and "YES!!!!!!!!" at the top, but let's not talk about top-posting in email.

      And it's even better when they put the "YES!!!!" right at the bottom, so you have to scroll past your own message to see a single word of theirs!

      • And it's even better when they put the "YES!!!!" right at the bottom, so you have to scroll past your own message to see a single word of theirs!

        Yep, it is, assuming they are in possession of half an ounce of intelligence, in which case they will quote only the specific question you asked (to which they are replying with "YES!!!!").

        Chances are the question you asked is short enough (when properly quoted) that both it and the response will be visible immediately, without the need for any scrolling.

    • Is it really so hard to snip the original message? The person probably remembers what they wrote.

      I'd like to disagree -- the person probably does *not* remember exactly what they wrote. At least that's the way it is with me, and when someone replies with something like "Yes, I think you were right", I usually don't know what I had originally said.

      Trimming too much is bad for comprehension; you should keep enough quoted material to establish context, IMO.

    • > The worst has to be when you send a long email to somebody, and it makes it way back to you with the original message and "YES!!!!!!!!" at the top

      No, worse than that is when you get a digest of a mailing list, which includes full quoting *seven* levels deep (and six, and five, and four (the three, two and one level mails being in the previous digest)), every one of them incuding the signature automatically added by the list manager say "please remember to trim quoted text".

      And worse than that is over 300 lines of Word generated style sheet in a mangled HTMLized mail to say "Me too" (plus full quote). And when you complain someone else says "I don't see that here, the problem must be your mail client reading it".
      • yes, you are so right. I think the problem is that most people just don't think about their actions beforehand. They act out of instinct or habit and aren't aware of the impact of their actions on others or even on themselves, and when they do, on occasion, think about the consequences, they're selfish enough that they don't really care about the impact on others and they value their comfort above all else. It is a problem with much more important things than email and mailing lists though, so I guess email quoting habits are a minor annoyance.

        Sometimes I wonder what will become of us bald apes. It seems to me, from observation, that most of us are almost hardwired to be selfish and to cling to our ignorance and parochialism as if they were virtues.

  • Yes, poorly formatted emails suck, it takes forever to find just where to click to get to that "FREE PORN!!! NO CREDIT CARD NEEDED!!!!!" site.

  • me too :) (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, it's as annoying as hell... Shanes asks: "I want to know how slashdot readers feel about the IMO ever worse quoting habits of people writing mails. When I started writing emails to friends and colleagues over 10 years ago I and everyone else quickly learned how to quote. These days most of the bytes in my inbox are "Original Message" quotes that Outlook people always include at the end of every mail. Doesn't anyone care about sending well edited mails anymore?" I have a simple rule, if I can't read it without editing it first, it's probably not worth my time. Do any of you get frustrated by the formatting of email in your inbox?

  • Unfortunately... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wolfger ( 96957 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @06:46AM (#2841091)
    The people who make the big e-mail software (Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook) have no concept of good e-mail editing techniques. I haven't used Outlook much (avoid Micro$oft like the plague!), but I have to use Notes at work. Notes makes it very difficult (well-nigh impossible) to properly format a reply. So I join the bandwidth-wasting crowd and do what's easiest at work.

    • Re:Unfortunately... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Rentar ( 168939 )
      Full ACK, in Outlook it is at least possible to write in a good style ('though you generally go through a lot of pain to be able to do so), but in Notes it is just not possible (at least I haven't found a sane way to do it, after I've used it for 3 years).
      I see the entire topic mainly from an Usenet-Perspective. Usenet is a bit better in this respect. The three groups I read frequently have almost consistent quoting style, others I read every now and then have not so great, but still good quoting habbits. It seems that the more technical a discussion gets, the better the quoting gets.
      And should you ever read the LKML archive [theaimsgroup.com] you'll find that although you'll find 'Outlook default quotings' none of the gurus use it ...

  • Quoting legal lines (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Merkins ( 224523 )

    Our company uses Outlook. Outlook has an option to include signatures in replys and forwards.

    Where this gets really nasty is when (as we do), you have a company standard signature, Name, title, phone, 4 URLs, plus a 10 line legal disclaimer.

    This is one of my pet peeves at work, having to scroll down 2 pages because you just got an email with....

    Yes, it does

    Followed by 17 lines of signature and you can't see the original message.

    I think the folks at my company take themselves a little too seriously....

    • ah!
      I love the great signtures -- of course at the bottom of emails -- which claim that if I am not the intended recipient of the email, I am legally obliged not to read it.

      It just seems that such information should come a bit sooner...
    • I know that many MTAs have an option to append a block piece of crap at the end of outgoing emails (or at least I think they do IIRC). Why not just use that functionality so that the information is only treated at the MTA level when it leaves your network?
  • Now that's the pot calling the kettle black. A slashdot moderator complaining that if he can't read a message without editing then he assumes that the content isn't worth his time. Cliff must have a procmail filter for CmdrTaco's emails.
  • The biggest problem is many people I trade emails with have come to be used to the way that Outlook etc does things by default. I try to send proper emails(10+ Years of expirence in doing so) that have the email "properly" quoted. ie, putting my comments after each point, and I actually get yelled at for this. I even had a boss tell me to learn how to send email. Yet anothe sign of the dumbed down net.
  • This is at least partly the fault of vendors. Last year I had a temp job for a company that had their email system run by an Exchange server, thus everyone had to use Outlook. I was working on a Sun Blade workstation, but since Outlook doesn't seem to have a Solaris version, I had to check my email from an old Mac in an unused office. That was annoying to begin with, but worse was the fact that:
    • it jeopardy [develooper.com] quoted [uwasa.fi] by default, and there was no way to override this setting
    • it posted as HTML by default, and the only thing you could configure was which font you want to use, not "whether or not there is a defined font in the first place"

    Etc. I tried to fight this by cutting & pasting my messages so that they'd be top-quoted -- The Way The Good Lord Intended -- but it was much too much of a pain in the ass, and being the only one in the company doing it just made me look funny. Likewise my selection of a monospace font -- it was like tilting at windmills.

    Yes, it's sad that not everyone has been brought into the culture in such a way that old netiquette would be honored, but that's just how it works when a subculture gets promoted to the mainstream. Yes, Microsoft could have made it easier to configure Outlook -- and to be fair, Outlook Express *is* a nice email client on the Mac (I just wasn't allowed to use it), and newer versions than this one ('98?) might be more flexible) -- and there's really no defence for their wholesale scuttling of all but their way of quoting messages. But what's done is done: as long as I can keep using Pine or Mutt, and read most of the mail coming to me, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Times have moved on...

    • I've been using Evolution to read mail off our Exchange server using IMAP for a while now. Aside from a couple of annoying things (I can't figure out how to include the IMAP inbox [and all subordinate folders] in the Summary window, it only uses its own inbox) it works very well. Also, there's no good taskbar mailchecker, they'll check /inbox, but if I have exchange filtering my mail, it won't show me if a message arrives in a subordinate folder, hence much window switching to check my mail. This usually causes me to run Outlook on my Windows machine.

      One could also use Mutt with IMAP if your exchange admins will allow IMAP.

      xrayspx
      Patiently waiting for Pronto! IMAP support.

      • As it happened, I was just temping for someone on maternity leave, and I only interacted with a handful of people, all of whom were in the same office. I'm pretty sure that something could have been arranged on Solaris -- Evolution, Pine/imap (ideally), or just find a place to plug the Mac in the same cubicle -- but it wasn't worth the effort.

        This is how the organization worked and it wasn't my place to change their ways.

        Now if they wanted to hire me permanently, and I had the patience to carve out a niche in which my more oldschool ways would work, that might be one thing. But I lacked the time and I lacked the will, and I would suggest that most people don't have the time or will to change something like this. If that's how the organization has chosen to work, then you really have little choice but to go along with it or work towards slow, stubbornly resisted change. C'est la vie...

  • How about an opposite POV? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @11:43AM (#2842173)
    Actually, I think that the default quoting of entire messages is a benefit. First the idea of "wasted storage" doesn't bug me. Storage is cheap these days.

    What I find value in is being able to go back in the thread and see the line of discussion, and why someone is asking me a question, and from what angle they're looking at it. In other words, it gives me the background and frame of reference that makes it easier to respond. And I only have to go back as far as I need (agreed that the most relevant information is towards the top, but sometimes it can be at the very bottom -- like a Director asking a question).

    Email, by far, is a 'lazy' medium. (Heck, they even have spell checkers built in.) However, there are worse ways to communicate. In the office, instant messenging has dropped to the lowest common denominator of communication. I've dropped down to using one letter replies like 'y' (yes), 'n' (no), 'k' (okay).
    • I agree the default quoting of entire messages is great to leave things in context; unfortunately, my visual desktop isn't vast as the 30GB of storage.

      Its all about something that is easy to digest and quote. What I see is that compulsory education^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlearning should be enforced so communication skills could be introduced to everyone. Learning by osmosis doesn't seem to work.
  • If you send mail to someone perennially disorganized and they need some context for your response, you append the original message(s) (if you receive a lot of those, you can figure out yourself what it means). For a point-by-point reply, you edit in bits and pieces of their original message. And if neither of those cases applies, you don't need to quote. Now, was that so hard?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I have to weigh in even though this is probably redundant and going to cost me karma

    The current "inclusion convention" for email is just to do whatever my mail program wants, normally "stick my reply over the quoted text". This results in huge messages, often with 10 or 20 quoted messages under them which bear little or no relevance to the current line of discussion.
    The end result for me is long, confusing email that eats space on my mail server (I'm an IMAP user).

    In most cases I advocate the FIRST quoting style described in the jargon file [tuxedo.org] - it makes the most sense for any email over 10 lines. It makes the most sense when reading over the email and it is the style I myself use. Additionally, I berate people frequently for not trimming off irrelevant stuff from their messages - If something is 6 levels back and hasn't been replied to chances are it wont spark discussion on the 7th mail.

    This has been my theraputic rant for the day :)

  • I thought the point of Ask Slashdot... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @01:41PM (#2843050) Homepage Journal
    ...was to get answers to obscure questions.

    What on earth is a little bitchfest doing here? There isn't even anything to respond to in the question (besides "yes, I do quote properly" or "no, I don't quote properly.")

    - A.P.

  • Me too? (Score:5, Funny)

    by J'raxis ( 248192 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @03:01PM (#2843771) Homepage
    Me too!

    -----Original Message-----
    From: cliff@slashdot.org
    Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 06:45:01 +0000
    Subject: Quoting in Emails?

    Shanes asks: "I want to know how slashdot readers feel about the IMO
    ever worse quoting habits of people writing mails. When I started writing
    emails to friends and colleagues over 10 years ago I and everyone else
    quickly learned how to quote. These days most of the bytes in my inbox are
    "Original Message" quotes that Outlook people always include at the end of
    every mail. Doesn't anyone care about sending well edited mails
    anymore?"     I have a simple rule, if I can't read it without editing it
    first, it's probably not worth my time. Do any of you get frustrated by
    the formatting of email in your inbox?
  • Email with unsnipped quotes makes my brain hurt, and so, out of consideration for my email recipients, I trim my posts. However, some email readers make trimming quoted text nearly impossible, or at least a serious pain in the neck.


    An example is Lotus Notes. It has lots of nifty functions, but its Reply and Forward functions leave a whole lot to be desired. To include an original message in a reply or forward, the whole thing is appended at the end, as with other text-based software. But the original is not quoted out, simply separated from the expected typing space at the top by the header. Furthermore, this header is a whitespace-heavy mess which you don't see in Lotus Notes, but can clearly see in text-based readers. Even more: you can't change your line length (fixed at 72), so you can't reduce the possibility of mis-wrapped text.


    To avoid creating unnecessarily large reply messages, I'll just copy the whole message to the clipboard, and add all the quote prefixes. It's a lot of work, so maybe it's a good thing: it encourages me, and conscientious writers, to trim posts heavily. Unfortunately, it really encourages huge messages or messages with no quoted text at all!


    In all, it makes me embarrassed to reply to people who are not using Lotus Notes.

  • I agree, that's it's good etiquette to not chain-quote, but really, most users can't be expected to follow old rules like that..

    old? yes.
    from the site:
    > I have a 10 Gig disk - don't you?

    Let's face it. Email etiquette is a niche. Same as websites that don't require graphics and/or plugins and/or javascript are a niche.

    Some days it bugs me. Some days I don't care about it. This is not your father's "net" (-:

    • Nope! It's contagious. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dubl-u ( 51156 )
      Let's face it. Email etiquette is a niche.

      One could make the same argument about any etiquette. And in some cases, like proper pinky placement while tea-sipping, the etiquette really is a niche, because the etiquette goes with something that is itself a niche. But that's not the case with email, which is rapidly becoming universal.

      Any reasonable etiquette standard, from editing your email to not using your cellphone during a movie to not slurping your soup, is about consideration for others, about trading a little effort on your part for some benefit to those you deal with. To develop a taste for manners, all you need is the chance to regularly experience both sides of the behavior. A daily shower seems like an unnecessary nuisance until you sit next to somebody who bathes monthly.

      Ever since the September that never ended [tuxedo.org], the Internet has been flooded with relative newbies. Newbies anywhere are notoriously short on manners. But the percentage of new people on the Internet has probably peaked already, so we should soon see some collective progress.

      Certainly, I've seen signs of it. I've stopped receiving "send a card to tumorous Timmy" forward hoaxes; all my correspondents have passed that stage. And I've seen progress in the real world, too; during the last three movies I've attended, I haven't had to kill a single person for cellphone use.

      And so it will go with quoting. A well-formatted message is more pleasant to read and easier to understand; those who want to communicate well will take the extra time. And those who don't catch on will look like dolts.
    • Let's face it. Email etiquette is a niche.

      So is writing good English, but the smart guys all do it...

  • Nope. At least, none that I could find.

Slashdot Top Deals

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

Close