the evils of quoting, was: Use of XML as a basis for e-mail

>> In 1975, headers were 40-50% of an average message. Now,
>> if they're 2% I'd be amazed (I haven't analyzed it in a while).

> I agree with this (not necessarity the numbers) but the principle.

I disagree. Headers have exploded, and many messages (especially those 
on mailinglists, which would be the bulk of all messages for many 
people) only use text. Header-to-text ratio varies between 10/90% and 
80/20%.

> I will
> say that mail quoting is a much larger part these days with the mail
> bandwidth, especially the form of reply behavior where people reply at 
> the
> top (no inline quoting, commenting) and simply keep addending the mail
> thread.

This is evil. Too bad you can't shoot people who do this.

I think it would be good to address quoting and over-quoting in a new 
protocol. If we can address over-quoting by embedding a pointer to the 
original message rather than the original message, that should save a 
good deal of bandwith and it makes it very simple to configure a user 
agent to disregard this and not display it. For regular quoting this 
gets a bit more complicated, but it's worth the effort as this way we 
get to cryptographically protect the quoted text.