Speaking of mail etc

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kevin D. Clark" <kclark at CetaceanNetworks.com>

> "Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net> writes:
>
> > Some purists say text-only email is the only "right" way.  I vehemently
> > disagree with that, based on an experience dating back to 1990.  The
company
> > where I worked at the time adopted cc:Mail and gradually distributed it
across
> > the branch offices.  At first hardly anyone used it, but once it took
off, the
> > company-culture was transformed in a way that consolidated its #1
industry
> > position (it's still a high-flyer in the top-10 list of Massachusetts
stocks).
> >  One aspect that I saw used *constantly* was use of highlighting (colors
and
> > bold) to keep track of quotations or to help make a point. [snip]
>
> I must politely (but vehemently) disagree with this.
>
> My experience goes like this:
>
> One day the company I used to work for rolled out Outlook/Exchange.  I
> was quickly able to get my mail via POP3, so I continued to use my
> HTML/MIME capable mailer.
>
> But a lot of other people went whole-hog and started using Outlook.
> In the beginning, aside from the whole Microsoft "application/ms-tnef"
> mess, I was still able to participate in email discussions.
>
> But then the insanity started....
>
> Instead of quoting text in the generally accepted way (like I am doing
> in this email message), people started using different fonts,
> emphasis, and *especially* colors to distinguish their quoted
> replies.  In many cases, these methods were the only method people
> were using to distinguish original text from quoted text.
[snip]

I ran into these issues when I used Lotus Notes (the successor of cc:mail).

Neither Notes nor cc:mail nor Outlook provide for the net's customary "left
indent quoting" standard, and I think that corporate users would be
uncomfortable seeing responses mixed in with original text anyway - Notes
and cc:Mail are supposed to have the "look and feel" of paper memos, which
means separate sections for each correspondent's input.

However, when corporate email clients met netaware users, the result, of
course, was the Pollack painting we all know and love, with replies
italicized or a different color or whatever. I used to cut the text out of
incoming Notes documents, paste it into Word, and run a macro command that
replaced every CR/LF with a CR/LF/> combination, so that I could reply in
internet style. There just wasn't any other way, and it's little wonder that
most users resorted to easier alternatives.

HTH. FWIW. YMMV.

Bill