List Mom's Pet Peeve

From: Dan Knight <dan_knight_at_email.domain.hidden>
Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2001 11:33:20 -0400

My pet peeve is people who quote too much when replying to the list. In particular, people who quote the entire original message right down to the footer.

As many of you know, I send out a reminder whenever I see that. It reads:

---

This is a semi-automatic message from Dan, the listmom.

Thanks for posting to the list.

Please be careful not to quote *too much* of the original message (your recent posting is quoted below) when replying to the list -- especially the header and/or footer. (You're not being singled out; we send this to everyone who does that.)

Thanks!
---

Since August 24, I've sent out 105 such messages to 85 different subscribers. The encouraging thing is that most seem to catch on quickly, eliminating the need for multiple notes. Those who get more than 4-5 of these notes may have posting privileges suspended -- I'm that serious about it.

Anyhow, here's an analysis by domain. Each subscriber is only counted once, and only domains with 2 or more reminders since August 24 are counted:

     yahoo.com           IIIIIIIIIIII
     mac.com             IIIIIII
     bellsouth.net       III
     earthlink.net       III
     sympatico.ca        III
     home.com            II
     mindpring.com       II
     rcn.com             II

For those of you who look down on AOL users, only one AOL user showed up on this list. Maybe that means AOL makes it hard to quote back or quote back too much -- I don't know.

It's interesting that far and away the highest number of offenses came from free email services. I suspect that Yahoo makes it too easy to quote the entire original -- am I right?

For the record, here are the most popular domains on the LEM-Swap list, our list with the most subscribers (710 active subscriptions as of this morning):

     yahoo.com           66
     mac.com             64
     aol.com             57
     earthlink.net       43
     home.com            29
     hotmail.com         22

All the rest are under 10 subscribers on the LEM-Swap list. I'm assuming membership on that list is fairly representative of the other lists.

Consider this your occasional reminder from the List Mom to be aware of how your email program works and be careful to quote selectively when replying to the list.

Thanks!

Dan Knight, president, Cobweb Publishing, Inc.

  publisher, Low End Mac                <http://lowendmac.com/>
  publisher, Digital-Views.com      <http://digital-views.com/>
  publisher, Digigraphica            <http://digigraphica.com/>

I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization. - Petronius

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Received on 2001-09-01 09:22:21