[H-GEN] Mail program

[Greg Black]

On 2004-06-26, Harry Phillips wrote:

> > PS: Harry, do you think you could find a way to drive your
> >     editor such that you didn't add trillions of extra blank
> >     lines (or lines with just ">" symbols)?  It's kind of
> >     irritating.
> 
> I would love to if I knew exactly what you meant? I add a single blank 
> line after the quoting and before the next block of text I am quoting.

The message I'm replying to now did not exhibit the problem I
was talking about, so it's clearly just a matter of how you
drive your editor.

Here's a cut from the message I was replying to previously.
Since the content is not important, I've chopped off the ends of
the lines and replaced the chopped off part with a single "|"
character.  This is to prevent any helpful re-formatting by
stupid mail readers.

    >>Worked: 7
    >>Failed: 7 (one of those took 3 |
    >>9?)
    > 
    >
    >So far we have far too few to re|
    >everybody on the list provides d|
    >make reliable predictions.
    >

    Yeah I know that the entire HUMBU|

As you can see, under each of the two quoted blocks, there's an
extra line with just a ">" character.  That's what i was talking
about.  My use of the term "trillions of extra [...] lines" was
mild hyperbole and covered all the messages with this problem
and all the copies that have been sent to people by all the
people in the world who do this.  This is not a huge thing, but
it's nicer if you don't do it.

> That's all I do and that is all I see when using Thunderbird. I am not 
> really good at reading headers, which mail program do you use?

The mail program I use is of little interest, other than that
it's one that presents messages as they are, not re-formatted in
some way that it thinks might be "nice".  However, I don't hide
it and it's easy to see in the headers.  Here is the relevant
header from your message, followed by one of mine:

    User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 (X11/20040528)
    User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i; gjb-muttsend.sh 1.5 2003-10-01

As you can see, I use mutt; as you can probably guess, I also
use a custom program of my own to actually send the message,
rather than mutt's default mechanism, but that has nothing to do
with the current discussion.

> I do not want this to be an annoyance, if it is something then maybe it 
> is a bug with Thunderbird and needs reporting.

Since you didn't do it on the latest message, I really think
it's you rather than the software; it's more a matter of going
back and *looking* at your messages before sending them -- and
of editing them if you see that they're messy.  In general, busy
people have a tendency to just skip messy messages, so it pays
to take the time to present things well.

Cheers, Greg