topposting (was: colourization in ls command)

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2004-10-15 09:35, Tom Connolly <tomc at cqg.com> wrote:
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 12 October 2004 at 17:09:29 -0600, Tom Connolly wrote:
> >> There is a nice little tool for Outlook users, [...]
> >>
> >> http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/
> >
> > We've seen the results of this tool in the recent past.  They weren't
> > convincing.
> >
> > Are you aware that your message was formatted with long/short lines?
>
> Looks ok to me.

Sorry but no; Greg is right.  Your post *did* exhibit the long/short
line bug of Outlook.

That's the problem with most of the email that Outlook sends, isn't it?
It looks ok to the poster but not to the reader.  Long/short lines that
Greg referred to is a common symptom of Outlook-formatted (or, to be
more precise, `unformatted', if I am excused for the pun) messages.

You, as the poster write a paragraph that seems perfectly fine when
wrapper in your preview window in Outlook, but eventually the reader of
your post has to make sense out of something like this:

        ----- Original message -----
        Sender: Firstname Lastname
        Sent: Oct 15, 2004
        Subject: Useless repetition of the subject, which is only a
                waste of bandwidth for people with a good, threading
                mail user-agent
        To: Person1; Person2; Person3
        Cc: Person4; Person5

        > Some of the original text is included here, most of the time
        everything the original
        > poster has said is included verbatim, without any sort of
        trimming
        > and a funny wrapping style like this mess you
        are reading now.

I can't even begin to describe how many things are stupid about this
format of replying.  The stripping of *real* email addresses, the
redundant and excessive inclusion of header information in the
attribution paragraph, the fact that the attribution *is* a paragraph,
the silly wrapping style, etc. are only a few of the evil things this
mailer does.  Unfortunately, despite having discussed this with Windows
users many times and tested various tools, hacks and add-ons with many
of them, I still haven't found one that fixes all the bugs in Outlook's
formatting of mail messages; ``outlook-quotefix'' is not an exception
to this.

What is very wrong about the wrapping style of Outlook (or the lack of
one) is that Outlook users might never become aware of it.  Just like
you didn't know about it until Greg pointed it out ;-)

Giorgos