On Sun, Dec 02, 2012 at 09:26:31AM +1300, Chris Bannister wrote: > On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 10:24:59AM -0500, Peter Davis wrote: > > > > Actually, it wasn't about GMail at all. It was about the fact that > > millions of email users don't care about line wrapping, or text/plain, > > or any of these other 40 year old conventions. The mutt-users group > > just happens to represent the minuscule segment of the email > > population that is still concerned about such things. > > Wrong. It was about netiquette on mailing lists.
Apparently even proper conversational quoting is too complex for you to follow. I was responding to a comment on a comment on an earlier post of mine. Since I wrote that earlier post, I think I have a pretty good idea what it was about. > I see now, how some of the posts in this thread seemed so weird! So > in this light, you'll see that the mutt-users mailing list just > happens to represent the majority of posters on mailing lists. Your conclusion seems to be drawn from thin air, since there's not a shred of evidence or even logic behind it. Mutt users, including the members of this list, comprise a minute segment of the email using, and mailing list using public. They in no way represent the email or mailing list population in general. Etiquette, or "netiquette" if you prefer, is basically the set of rules of conduct, explicit or implicit, that are adopted and adhered to by a population to establish norms of behavior. However, since the vastly overwhelming majority of email users use HTML mail and don't care about line wrapping, the 72-column wrapping "rule" and the non-HTML "rule" can hardly be considered "netiquette" except perhaps within this tiny circle. Otherwise they are, at best, quaint relics of an earlier era. That said, an individual mailing list such as this one can certainly establish its own rules. In particular, the owners of the list can. So I checked the "welcome" message for this list. The *only* rules given were "Please write only in English" and "... please check out these pages ..." exhorting users to consult the documentation (with links provided) about any questions. So the owners have not seen fit to establish a 72-character line length rule, or a bottom- or conversational-posting rule, or even a "no HTML" rule. I supposed you could argue that these would be so obvious that stating them would be redundant. Even so, these implicit rules would apply only to this list, and not to mailing lists in general. You might want to be more careful of this distinction in your writing. -pd
