Top posting solution

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 10 August 2004 at 14:58:02 -0700, Kevin Stevens wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, JJB wrote:
>
>> The fact of life is all the Unix mail clients adhere to the Unix
>> email format of posting the reply to the bottom of the email while
>> indenting with a quote character.
>
> Not true.  Pine doesn't, for example.  It begins a reply with the cursor
> at the very top of the message body.

In fact, the entire concept is flawed.  You should be able to write
text anywhere you want in a reply.  Even most Microsoft-oriented MUAs
allow that.

>> There is a little known fix for MS/Outlook express and MS/Office
>> Outlook email clients that change the behavior of these MS/Windows
>> email clients so they adhere to the Unix email format of posting the
>> reply to the bottom of the email while indenting with a quote
>> character.

Yes, I refer to it at http://www.lemis.com/email/fixing-outlook.html.
Unfortunately, it doesn't address the basic problems with "Outlook".

> "Fix" is a loaded term which presumes that something is broken.

I think that "Outlook" is broken.  Putting the text in the right
relative place doesn't help much if it's so difficult to write
well-formatted messages that most people don't bother.  What any good
MUA needs is a text editor (or, preferably, an interface to one) that
makes it easy to send well-formatted messages.

>> To all you Unix hard liners, Please instead of complaining to the
>> top posters, it would be so much nicer if you just informed the
>> [truncated by sender]
>
> It would actually be much nicer if they'd just quit trying to
> enforce their preferences on others.

It would actually be much nicer if people would return to literacy
standards that existed, not only in the computer world, before
Microsoft came along.  I've long given up actively trying to help
people write literate mail.  I just ignore their messages.  That's not
helpful either, except to me.

>> MS/Windows top poster of the above links so they know about the
>> solution to fix their email clients to adhere to the Unix email
>> format used on this list.
>
> Please provide a cite/ref to the "Unix email format" as something
> more concrete than your personal definition.  And more concrete than
> RFC 1855, whose second sentence reads: "This memo does not specify
> an Internet standard of any kind."

RFC 1055 is a good start.  What matter is that the second sentence
states (obviously incorrectly for an RFC)?  It seems that you'd reject
anything which isn't concrete enough for your own way of thinking.
Certainly I don't think of a "Unix email format" (or even a "UNIX
email format"); I just like to be able to read messages which don't
make themselves painful to read, that don't contain lots of irrelevant
junk, and that don't give me the impression that the sender is only
semi-literate.  For more details, you might like to take a look at
http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html, though I suppose you'll
find a reason to reject it.

Greg
--
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