[pchelpers] Re: Overquoting

Hi Pen

>> The remainder appeared to be white space (quoted blank lines). The 
>> script must be counting them.
>> GTCox wrote:
>>> John, there were only 17 quoted lines in my last post. How come it got 
>>> spit out as having 31?
> 
> 
> HUH? How can it quote something that is blank. I must be dense!

All lines that are quoted have > signs at the beginning. These quote 
signs are always visible while composing the message, but they are often 
rendered instead as a continuous vertical bar when the message has been 
sent and received.

So while composing a message, in order to see how many quoted lines 
there are, one just has to count the number of lines with > signs. These 
signs are also added at the beginning of empty lines between paragraphs 
(to show that this is from the same person) so that these empty lines 
are counted as quoted. In addition, all email programs should add an 
empty line with a quote sign after the quoted part so that the answer, 
which is supposed to come after the quote, doesn't run into the quote. 
Most email programs add up these empty quoted lines at the end of the 
quote so that when a private email message contains 5 old messages, it 
has at least 5 empty quoted lines at the end. In addition, Thunderbird 
has an old bug consisting of adding 2 empty lines after the quote 
instead of 1.

The way Freelists decides if you're overquoting is that it counts the 
number of *consecutive" lines with > signs at the beginning. So you can 
actually quote the whole original text as long as you never have more 
than 30 *consecutive*  lines with > signs.

If email programs didn't add quote signs at the beginning of empty lines 
between paragraphs and didn't count these empty lines as part of the 
quote, very few messages would be flagged as overquoting (even when they 
are quoting three old messages with a total of 200 lines), because very 
few people write messages with paragraphs longer than 30 lines. Many 
people however accidentally quote the entire message they are responding 
to (and even previous ones) because they press the Send button before 
reading the whole message they are sending. These are exactly the kind 
of messages the Freelists script is trying to prevent to prevent wasting 
server space and bandwidth and the time of all the readers of the 
mailing list.

The easy way to avoid the problem is to reread one's answer, including 
the quoted parts, before sending it, as John's rules suggest. That way 
one notices what one is soon making everybody else read too. That way 
one also notices if one's answer makes no sense without having to read 
the quote, in which case it's better to have the quote first. Otherwise, 
one makes everyone first read the incomprehensible answer and then makes 
everyone jump down to understand what the answer is referring to and 
then makes everyone jump back up and reread the answer up top. Many 
people who press the Send button before reading their *entire* message
*including* the usually unnecessary quote at the end, do not realise how 
much unnecessary reading and rereading and jumping back and forth they 
are causing.

George's answer accidentally and unnecessarily quoted both Cyril's 
answer to Scott and Scott's answer to John, which contained a quote from 
John.

Here is the quoted part of George's message with numbers and hard 
carriage returns instead of only the > signs:





1> Scott
2> Thunderbird works the ame way here. I tried to resend a message that 
I sent
3> to a bcc list because I forgot to include the attachment and the 
result was
4> the same as Re-Na described.
5>
6>   Cy
7>
8>
9> On 2/3/06, Scott McNay <wizard@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
10>>
11>>
12>> Hi John,
13>>
14>> Friday, February 3, 2006, 4:12:30 PM, you wrote:
15>>
16>> JD> What you are describing is caused by the correct functioning of
17>> JD> the BCC (blind carbon copy). It isn't meant to be seen or
18>> JD> captured. One way to
19>>
20>> What she's saying is that it's doing this for an email that SHE just
21>> sent, not one that she received.  Therefore the information should be
22>> available.
23>>
24>> --
25>> Scott.
26>>
27>>
28>
29>
30>

It seems that at least one more line was added and that the script is a 
bit pedantic in not tolerating even 31 lines. It could also be taught to 
not count quoted empty lines at the end. However, my physically carried 
out line count shows that the discrepancy was not as bad as George 
thought when he thought that his post had only 17 quoted lines.


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