topposting (was: colourization in ls command)

[Tom Connolly]

Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> 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

That's all true but at least it solves the topposting problem which is what
most
People seemed to be complaining about. :)

Tom