[H-GEN] Mail program

[Greg Black]

On 2004-06-26, Harry Phillips wrote:
> Greg Black wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Oh so the trillions has been reduced to a single line, I really thought 
> it was like 10 or 20 lines, phewww.

Well, it was one line at a time; but it happened every place
there was quoted material.  It adds up and it's just noise.

>> 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
> 
> I wasn't accusing you of hiding it, I just didn't know what to look for. 

I didn't take it as an accusation; you asked a question and I
provided an answer, with a comment that might be clearer when
you read on.

> When I first looked I thought it was exim, after a little Googling I 
> knew it wasn't. Thanks, now I know to look for the "User-Agent" line, 
> you learn something new everyday.

Like all such headers, you can't trust it.  On some systems, my
muttsend script puts a random user-agent header in; on others,
it puts "nothing to see here"; on others, it deletes the header;
and on others it tells the unvarnished truth.  And some MUAs use
different headers to provide this information, such as x-mailer
or x-posted-by.

> Is that better? I have deleted all of the > when there is no text 
> following and I only have one single line between the quoted text and 
> mine.

Yep, it's beautiful; well, almost ...

> After all these years I did not know those little things were so 
> bothersome.

It's just a basic bit of communication.  If you work to make
your messages easy to read and understand, people will be more
inclined to respond positively -- they'll see that you cared
enough to make an effort, they'll be pleased that you showed
them enough respect to want to make things easy for them,
they'll find it easier to see what your message is and to see
how they can help you.  Similarly, programmers who work hard to
set out their code so that it's easy to read make things easier
for themselves and for others who have to read it later on.

So, now for my final recommendation about email formatting.  If
you look above, you'll see that I've changed the lines with ">"
characters at the beginning -- actually, I didn't do it by hand,
but left it to a tiny C program[1] that I wrote for the purpose.

When your message arrived and was processed by my mailer's reply
processor, we had lines that started with all manner of stuff,
as we see here (again with lines truncated to prevent wrapping):

    > >>That's all I do and that is all|
    > >>really good at reading headers,|
    > >
    > >The mail program I use is of lit|
    > >it's one that presents messages |

Your mailer puts ">" at the start of lines; mine puts "> "; and
the end result is messy.  I've modified it so that we have the
appropriate number of ">"'s, followed by a single space.  This
way, it's easy to see the nesting level, and the text is easy to
read as well; and the lines don't get too long with multiple
levels of quoting.  The above group changes to this:

    >>> That's all I do and that is all|
    >>> really good at reading headers,|
    >> 
    >> The mail program I use is of lit|
    >> it's one that presents messages |

Yummy, no?

Anyway, that's the end of my contribution to email etiquette for
this week.

Cheers, Greg

[1] Yes, of course Mark would have written it in Perl; and
    Andrae would have found a way to do it with one of his
    perverse languages like Haskell; and I might have written it
    in awk.  But the C program is literally 20 lines of code and
    took about 2 minutes to write and test.  Since I invoke it
    from within my editor, it's nice to have something that's
    really light and fast.  And yes, I'm a C programmer, so
    that's the tool I use.