Top posting

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 10:45:00 EST
David Andrew - Sun MDE said:

>Paul,
>
>I am not advocating keeping entire message history, unless absolutlely 
>needed for context.

Okay, then I mis-understood the point you were trying to make.

>And I specifically addressed interleaving, with an added 1-liner as an intro.

Right, which I think confused me, because you also said:

>> If everyone top-posted, the thread would be intact,

It seemed that you were advocating top posting with the occasional 
interleaved comments.  Top-posting a small comment which has nothing 
in the replied-to post to reference makes sense, as long as you're 
not making comments at the top, and keeping the entire message body 
intact at the bottom just because (i.e. traditional Outlook behavior).

>On the other hand, your message from gnhlug-discuss looks like this (and 
>this is with "abbreviated headers"), with 27 lines in the header and 13 
>lines in your trailer).  This is the only alias with such a formidable 
>header.

Is 27 the count for which you displayed?  I'm only counting 20, and 
only if I count the lines which were wrapped as individual.

Regardless, AFAIK, all lists managed by MailMan add the following 
lines to the header:

	X-BeenThere:
	X-Mailman-Version:
	List-Help:
	List-Post:
	List-Subscribe: 
	List-Id:
	List-Unsubscribe: 
	List-Archive:

Each one of those is quite useful, IMO.  Maybe not to all, but for 
those with mail clients which use them, they're quite helpful.
My mail client (exmh) upon recognizing those lines in the header, 
adds a button to my menu bar which allows me to select the proper 
Help, Post, Subscribe, Unscubscribe, and Archive URLs without needing 
to cut'n'paste an address.  It's a case of making the computer do the 
tedious work for you.

Most mail clients hide the headers so you don't even see them, so I'm 
curious why you find them bothersome.  Does DTMail not behave 
correctly with these headers (which are all RFC compliant by the 
way)?

As for the 13 lines in the trailer, again, I'm a little confused as 
to which 13 you're referring to.  There are 6 which are part of my 
.sig file, are you counting those?  If so, they are unique to me, and 
are not 'extraneous lines added by the alias'.  The only lines I can 
identify which fit that description are these:

    _______________________________________________
    gnhlug-discuss mailing list
    gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
    http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss

Which, again, are added by the MailMan software, and server a useful 
purpose, which is to provide everyone on the list a means to quickly 
identify and access infomation about the e-mail list.  If you've ever 
been a list manager and inundated with requests from subscribers to 
'please unsubscribe me from this list', then you'd quickly come to 
appreciate these footers.  If not, then I can see how you might 
consider them an annoyance.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
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