On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 11:00:07PM -0700, Nate Duehr wrote:
> Chen Xiao Fan wrote:
> >I like your posting style: context posting. However the email
> >clients are not making this easier and this is across Linux
> >and Windows. Few people are using context posting since it
> >requires more effort on the user' part. I do admire those
> >who do this. 
> 
> I haven't seen any significant difference in how this works in any 
> e-mail client in many years.

It's the client that defines how easy/difficult it is to do context
posting.

Here at Georgia Tech I still use Mutt: a Unix based text E-mail client.
When I do replies it drops me into the vi editor. This makes it easy
to context reply, and so I do so.

At work I use the Outlook webmail client. When replying it doesn't
post a leading edge of anything in front of the quoted text. This
makes it dificult to context post because you have to have a visual 
separation between the quoted and new text.

> I'm not sure what you're referring to about clients making it more 
> difficult.

Clients that makes no differentiation between quoted and new text.

> 
> There's only one e-mail client that I know of that makes it difficult 
> and that's only when it's in HTML or rich-text modes.  Both of which are 
> rarely necessary to get one's point across.
> 
> Some really good e-mail clients actually make contextual posting easier 
> -- if you highlight the portion of the person's message you wish to 
> reply to and then hit the Reply button or keyboard command, only that 
> portion of the original message is quoted.
> 
> Some clients are getting more intelligent about how people like to 
> communicate, and some clients are just adding colors and fonts and 
> making communication more difficult by making contextual replies harder 
> to do.

Agreed. It's a syndrome I see with my wife. See just likes her E-mail to
look cute. And fonts and colors make it cure. It rarely transmits any
additional information content however.

> I would think that would be enough right there for most people to look 
> for a better client, but most don't.  They take the path of least 
> resistance and use either whatever is provided by some IT person or came 
> with the machine.

True. For example at work I use the webmail client. If I really wanted to
work hard at it, I could equip all of my machines with an IMAP based
local client, like Evolution. But it does take time and energy to configure
each client.

The best solution would be to run my on webmail server, such as SquirrelMail,
and build the interface to my liking. It takes time and effort however.


> 
> This really isn't [EE] at all, so I'm going to stop now unless you move 
> it to [OT].  Just not sure if you read [OT], so last reply here.

I'll repost to OT.

BAJ
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