[MlMt] insertFormatString... ${} expansions listed somewhere?

Benny Kjær Nielsen mailinglist at freron.com
Fri Sep 19 05:21:00 EDT 2014


On 18 Sep 2014, at 21:48, Kai Großjohann wrote:

> On 18 Sep 2014, at 17:54, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:
>
>> On 18 Sep 2014, at 14:42, Jeremy Cowgar wrote:
>>
>>> My company wants corporate email replied to in Outlook fashion :-(.
>>
>> That is simply depressing. I cannot imagine the reasoning behind such 
>> a strange requirement. I might be alone on this, but when I see this 
>> quoting style then “competent professional” are not the first 
>> words to cross my mind :-)
>
> Actually, I find that the Outlook threading is better than I had 
> feared.  It actually works pretty well for a "linear" thread like this 
> one (the one I'm responding to):

My comment was mainly triggered by the fact that a company would dictate 
a specific quoting style including making it look like it was generated 
by Outlook.

In general, I dislike top-posting, but that was not the main issue here.

> I understand that mixing the different styles just gives weird 
> results.  So I understand why the company doesn't want different 
> people to use different styles, because the mixture is worse than 
> either style by itself.

Agreed. And MailMate supports both top- and bottom-posting and I'm not 
going to dictate the use of one or the other -- also not on this list.

For the record, for me top/bottom posting is not just about the 
ordering. Top posting is a “lazy” reply style in the sense that it 
encourages adding a comment to the top of the email leaving it to the 
recipient to figure out what is commented. This works in some cases and, 
ignoring the increasing quote levels, it can be fine for 
instant-messaging-like correspondence. Doing the same thing when bottom 
posting is of course even worse. Bottom-posting requires:

* Cleaning up the replied email leaving out irrelevant parts (while not 
leaving out too much).
* Answering/commenting each part of the email where it is relevant.

This email is a good example of how I do this. Most often only one or 
two quote levels are needed, but in this email I had to use three levels 
before my first comment.

When sending emails to multiple recipients (like on a mailing list) I 
find it is even more important to do this work. I write it once, but 
hundreds of people might read it. I spend a few more seconds on my email 
and each of them save those same seconds when reading it.

To conclude and **close** this discussion before it begins:

* “Bottom posting” is a really bad name and I should change it.
* I'm not going to dictate a specific reply style on this mailing list. 
I'll just try to lead by example :-)
* I do know that I and anyone thinking like me have lost this 
“battle” to Outlook and other main stream email clients many years 
ago. I'm in no way saying that I won't make MailMate more friendly to 
top-posting if anything is needed for that.

-- 
Benny
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