On Thu, Dec 16, 1999 at 08:43:01AM -0500 or thereabouts, Subba Rao wrote:
>
> Is there anyway to include the original message, for a reply, below the
> .signature? My personal preferance is to send a clean reply with my sig
> and then followed by the original message. Right now, the message is
> above the sig and for each reply, I have to yank the sig and paste above
> the original message.
>
> Any pointers appreciated. Thank you in advance.
I have seen this accomplished by including the original email as an
attachment following the reply (with the sig attached to the reply
rather than the attachment).
I have to say that I dislike it intensely. I recently received a message
where there were several of these. There were in fact one -thousand-
lines of "reply-to-reply-to-reply", "reply-to-reply", "reply", "original
message", and well over one -hundred- of these attachments in reverse
order. If they had been accomplished in the "quoted material at the
top; replies follow in chronological order" fashion, it might have been
bearable. That's the logical consequence of what happens when you put
the original at the end.
I hadn't realised until ranting about this that some mailers include a
facility to - er - read backwards... (boggle.)
I gather that the mailer which is responsible for this 'convention'
is Lotus Notes, which insists that you put the quoted material
underneath. However well it works on an internal mail system, I really
think it's a bad idea for sending to people outside that company,
when these other people won't necessarily have mailers that read
backwards. In elm, for example, you can't even page backwards through
the same message. (Okay, so this is a misfeature in elm. There's
still plenty of people stuck with it.) So if you're on a mailing list
and you read a reply to something you haven't yet received, you have to
read the reply, and -then- the original message, and then go back and
re-read the message again to see how the reply relates to the original.
Doing this once is bad. Doing it repeatedly is horrid :(
If you must do it, include the the original email as an attachment.
But (IMHO IMHO IMHO, YMMV) better by far is to stick to the idea of
putting the quoted stuff (trimmed!) and the name of that person at
the top, and the reply beneath.
Pretty please? :)
Only other pointer I can think of is RFC 1855, and I'm afraid it
says, in section 3.1.1, "General Guidelines for mailing lists and
NetNews", of your suggestion, "Don't do it":
Linkname: rfc1855 - Netiquette Guidelines
URL: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just
enough text of the original to give a context. This will make
sure readers understand when they start to read your response.
Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the
postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a
response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context
helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!
Some people will doubtless say that RFC 1855 is outdated, of course :)
Telsa
