[asterisk-users] Please remove me from the mailing list.

[Rick Green]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2010, David Gibbons wrote:

> Yes, gmail DOES default to top posting, because bottom posting is silly 
> (in general, but especially for a client that hides quoted text (like 
> gmail)). Top posting is modern. And better. And doesn't make me scroll 
> through 10 thousand messages and awful rsa keys to get to the message... 
> FLAME AWAY!!!
  This is not intended as a flame...  I just got a gmail account a month 
ago, and haven't used it but for a single google group and calendar 
notifications.  This morning, after seeing the above message, I actually 
hit reply on several messages, and this is what I found:

1) In every case, gmail presented me with the entire text of the message 
in the compose window.  There was NO indication of 'hidden' full-quote. 
Yes, the cursor is initially placed at the top of the window.

2) The 'Daily Agenda' mails I get from Google Calendar arrive in some kind 
of rich formatting, but right at the top of the composer window is a small 
unobtrusive link labelled '<Plain text', which strips the formatting, and 
makes deleting the unnecessary text trivial.

3) Plain text email arriving from a friend's android/gmail device are 
displayed in plain text already.

4) I searched thru the settings dialog, and I found nothing where I had 
explicitly told it to include the text in a reply, or to show or hide that 
text.  I DID specify that 'plain text' was to be my default outgoing 
format.

   IMHO, top-posting isn't the problem, but just an obvious symptom of the 
real problem, which is failure to edit/strip the quotes to the bare 
minimum.  When a thread gets hijacked by top-posters, who bang out their 
thoughts without even scrolling down to see all the garbage below, another 
problem also becomes apparent, and that is the failure of many MUAs to 
honor 'sigdashes', which is the convention of preceeding your sigfile with 
a line that is 'dash dash space <CR>'.  A compliant MUA will strip that 
line and everything after it when quoting for a reply or forward.  Note 
for the list admin:  Please preceed your message-footer with a sigdashes 
line!

-- 
Rick Green

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
                                   -Benjamin Franklin

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our
safety and our ideals."
                                -President Barack Obama 20 Jan 2009