Humble Request: Please Omit Original Emails from Your Response

Subject: Humble Request: Please Omit Original Emails from Your Response
From: "David K. Rathbun" <drathbun -at- linguateq -dot- com>
To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 10:50:36 -0400

You guys seem like a friendly, sensible bunch, so I thought I'd ask you a
favor.

Evidently we have two types of people who subscribe to this list: those who
prefer to get each email posted to the list separately, sometimes several
dozen each day, and those who get a single digest of emails each day. The
digest is simply a chronological compilation of those emails sent to the
list, with a header showing the subject lines of each email in the digest.
According to the TECHWR-L site, "Digests are daily mailings which include
all postings to TECHWR-L from the last 24 hours. These are unedited, and
unmoderated--they just give you one big message instead of many little
ones."

(There is also a third group, those who read the list on a news server, but
I imagine that is a small minority.)

I am a digest person. Those of you who read the digest will understand
exactly what I mean.

Here is my problem: when I get the digest, and there are several replies to
the same thread-originating email, the contents of the first email are
replicated a large number of times in the digest. In other words, each
person who has replied to the thread-originating email included the contents
of the original email in their reply. The result is that I have to scroll
through the same email half a dozen or more times in a single digest.
Because of the way the various email client programs format the original
email's included text, it is sometimes difficult to tell where a given
thread ends, and the next thread begins.

My request is this: can you make sure that when you reply to a given thread,
that you exclude the previous emails in the thread from your response?

Or is that inappropriate for those of you who get the individual emails? I
will struggle on with the digest if my proposal interferes with the ability
of other participants in this list to read, understand, and respond to
threads of inquiry.

What do you think?

PS. "To get digests, send a message to lyris -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Put anything
on the subject line, and include on the first line of the message SET
TECHWR-L DIGEST " (also from the TECHWR-L site.)

PPS. By the way, when I want to reply to a thread, I email my response to
techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com, making sure that I have copied the subject
header from the thread, and inserted the notation "RE:" before it.











Previous by Author: RE: FrameMaker releases (was FrameMaker vs Ventura) and PDF Mark
Next by Author: Re: Humor in Technical Writing REVISITED
Previous by Thread: Re: Developing CBT courses
Next by Thread: Re: Humble Request: Please Omit Original Emails from Your Response


What this post helpful? Share it with friends and colleagues:


Sponsored Ads