Excessive Quotes and Big .sigs

Excessive Quotes 

Most email programs will automatically quote the entire original article when replying. 

This can be handy when replying to a personal email, however it results in huge bloated, unreadable messages when sent to a list and makes reading the archived conversations difficult and annoying.

How big a quote is necessary when replying?  Often none at all, but otherwise, usually a line or two will suffice.  Only when a debate is under way, is it ever necessary to quote large passages -- and then usually only a sentence or two at time interspersed with your comments.

How does one get rid of all the unnecessary quotes in a reply?  Simply place your cursor at the beginning of the offending section and click down and drag to the end of the passage.  This should result in reversed video text (highlighting) of the passage.  Then, simply pressing any key will delete the entire section.  If you have erased too much, use Edit/undo from the menu or ctrl+z to restore the section and try again.

You can also set some software to only quote when you ask it to by adjusting the 'options' or 'preferences' for that software.

Big .sigs

Most email software allows the writer to include a signature at the end of every outgoing email.  Sometime it shows in your editor, sometimes it doesn't and is just added when you hit 'send'.

Signatures can be useful when used with restraint and consideration for the audience, however the kind know as vanity signatures and which include big ASCII drawings and very personal detail about the sender -- including home address and fax number -- are inappropriate for use on a list such as BEE-L. 

BEE-L is a high volume list and irrelevant material just overburdens the distribution and the recipients mailboxes, as well as wasting everyone's time.

Our goal is to make BEE-L very readable, very relevant, and very interesting and to avoid anything that increases volume without increasing content.

Since the archives are a valuable resource and also our FAQ, we try to prevent unnecessary bulk from large vanity signatures and unnecessary quotes as much as possible.

Thanks for understanding.