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

On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 10:58:15AM +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> 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%.

Perhaps we should answer two questions:

1. Is it important what these figures are?
2. If so, can we get some accurate measures of them rather than guessing?
 
> >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.

Somebody at work the other day, on the technical team (OK, a web designer) 
made fun of me the other day because I put my answers "inside other's 
people's e-mail instead of putting it all at the top like you should do". I 
then proceeded to give her a stern talking to. She didn't listen.

In the same way popular media think emoticons were born out of mobile phone 
text messaging, I suspect we might be about to lose the battle on 
top-posting.
 
> 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.

Indeed. I was thinking about this before. If you were to allow for being 
able to successfully pull back the original message and check the signature 
on it, you would be able to establish that when quoting you, I was in fact 
quoting you... 

-- 
Paul Robinson