Guidelines for email

Aside from the clutter factor mentioned by Len, there is also the problem 
that most of the mail clients you folks are using seem to break lines on 
character boundaries instead of word boundaries.  This would make it 
nearly impossible to ascertain that the initials followed by a colon 
would end up in the left margin when reading the mail with a text-based 
mail program such as PINE or ELM, for example.

Can't we just continue with the time-honored method of putting a ">" 
character before the quoted text, and leaving the response text as is, to 
stand out simply by the absence of any preceding characters or markup?

I agree that something needs to be done about keeping subject lines in 
agreement with the content of the message, but why do we have to alter 
those aspects of e-mail correspondence that everybody is used to, and 
which up until now have seemed to work well for everybody?  If they 
aren't working well for others, I apologize for this little diatribe<grin>.

E-mail works great in ASCII for a wide range of users and mailers, please 
let's not move to some kind of markup method that will make it more 
tedious to listen to with speech.

Just my two cents worth,

Jim Rebman
jrebman@netcom.com

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 1997 15:41:33 UTC