[pct-l] (Guest Post) Why is it so hard...?

[edmond at mydogmeg.net (Edmond Meinfelder)]

At 08:16 PM 1/21/2004 -0600, Peter Plumeria wrote:
>Why is it so hard when replying to a posting to cut out the hundreds of 
>lines of text that make up the digest version.

The problem is habituation to an interface. When replying to an emails over 
and over, people hit the same reply button, start typing text and then hit 
'send.' What we are asking is for people to introduce a new step between 
hitting reply and send, editing the text. When people get use to performing 
a sequence of steps, they tend to repeat the steps without thinking, even 
when the sequence is not applicable. Introducing change for a specific 
condition is very hard.

>p.s. I know that this is probably flogging a dead horse since others have 
>complained before me (with little effect), but I am at the point of 
>unsubscribing from the list since reading the digest when inclduing 
>multiple old digests is becoming such a pain...

Though I dislike using the reply-to header in email messages, perhaps the 
digests should have a "reply-to" address. At the reply-to address, a filter 
could check the size of the email and, if over 4k, shoot a warning message 
back to the sender, otherwise forward the message onto the list. This could 
be done in Procmail.

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