SEELANGS Administrivia - Quoting Text

[Alex Rudd]

Dear SEELangers,

I've noticed something happening here more and more often recently,
and feel the need to bring it to your attention:

I know some of you are new to this thing we call "e-mail,"
and to mailing lists, but there's a simple convention which
makes life much easier and many of you are ignoring it.  I
offer this in the spirit of constructive criticism:

When you reply on the list to someone else's post, do *not*
quote their entire message, especially when it's a long one.
Keep in mind that if the topic in the Subject: line was at
all interesting to us, we probably read the original message
in its entirety, and recently enough that we remember it.  If
you're going to quote text from that original post in your
reply, *only quote those portions of it to which you're
replying*.  You can do that.  I don't know of one mail program
which won't let you edit out-going mail.  Just delete the
extraneous lines.

In addition to that, don't quote the .signatures from people's
posts in your replies.  If you want to just put their names,
fine, but we already saw the rest of the .signature in the
original post.

You might be wondering why I'm making a big deal about this.
Two reasons:  First, it gets a little annoying having to read
through a whole lot of text you've already seen to get to the
part you haven't.  Some people read this list in DIGEST format,
and they can't just skip to the next message; they've got to
read through the entire current post to get to the next.  Folks
have complained privately to me about this, and I tend to agree
with them.


Second, although I don't mention this as often as I should, each
post on SEELANGS is archived here on LISTSERV at CUNYVM.  That
means that the City University of New York is allocating disk
space to us so that we can store our old conversations and
have them available in the future for searching.  Disk space
is not an infinite resource.  Just a few months ago, the disk
holding the archives of one of my other lists reached 97%
capacity, and the LISTSERV maintainer had to do some juggling
to get everything straightened out.  Then when it reached 99%
capacity, I was forced to close the list temporarily while I
cleaned out the archives, manually deleting what really didn't
need to be there.  Every little bit you can do to keep
extraneous text from filling up the disk will be appreciated.

By the way, if you'd like to learn how to search through the
archives, send e-mail to LISTSERV at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Internet) or
LISTSERV at CUNYVM (Bitnet) and in the body of the text put:

GET SEELANGS SEARCH F=MAIL

and LISTSERV will send you a file I wrote explaining the basics.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and, with
regards to quoting text, your cooperation is appreciated.

Thanks.

- Alex, list owner of SEELANGS
.............  ..................................  ......................
Alex Rudd    ||     |    |  __| John Jay College || ahrjj at cunyvm.cuny.edu
ARS KA2ZOO   <>  ›  | ›  | ( of Criminal Justice <> --=---=---=---=---=--
212 875-6274 || ›__/ ›__/ ›___| City Univ. of NY || *Standard Disclaimer*