From: Paul W. Abrahams [mailto:abrahams@acm.org]
My impression (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that when you're replying to a message using OE, OE doesn't make the text of the original available for editing -- in fact, you don't even see the original when you're composing your reply. So that raises the question, which someone more familiar with OE could usefully answer: is it somehow possible to compose more useful replies, following good quotation practice, under OE -- and if so, how.
Okay, here's some enlightenment about MS OE and MS Outlook for those interested. I use both MS Outlook and Outlook Express for all my email. you can configure them to reply to emails as inline text. I figure most list readers would consider my reply here good quotation practice (hopefully) at least for the body of the message. The top of the message, however, we're SOL. There is no config to do the
From the office of Paul W. Abrahams
kind of quoting, only what you see above
From: Paul W. Abrahams
OE may be a hideous abomination, but it still behooves us to assist OE users, who may have no choice in the matter, in participating usefully on this list.
:) The problem is BY DEFAULT MS Outlook and OE write in HTML. So users who don't bother configuring their MS O[E] will write to the list in HTML (which makes it near impossible to quote correctly). And, it is not easy to get to the part of the MS configs where you tell it to stop using HTML and start using text. (It's not difficult, just takes some rooting around). For anyone who is ambitious enough to learn about linux, configuring MS to write text and quote with a ">" is not difficult at all. However, the difficulty comes when someone writes in HTML. If someone writes me in HTML, I cannot force MS O[E] to respond in straight text, only HTML. In which case believe it or not if I really wnat to reply to the list and it's a short post I'm replying to I cut and paste the post to straight text, add all the ">" in manually, and cut and paste back to the editor. *sigh* Ben Yau