Quoting

[Gene Collins]

Hi Karen and all.  Regardless of what quoting style you use, judicious
quoting is always in order.  Some folks have a habit of hitting the
reply button, typing in their response, and not removing the unnecessary
quoted material at the bottom.  This wastes network bandwidth, and disk
space on the mail server the message is going to.

For example.  Let's say I'm responding to a ten k message, and all I
want to do is send a "please send me a copy also." message.  If I trim
the quoted material, and only reference the material I want a copy of
instead of the whole message, My out going message could be only one k
or less, instead of the original ten k.  My out going mail server didn't
have as much to process, and the list server it finally arrived at,
which may have several thousand members on a list, had lots less to do. 
Let's say the list has a round one thousand members for example. 
Instead of the ten million plus characters that would have had to be
processed for the ten k message, the server only has to process a
million characters for the one thousand one k messages.

The fact that people have been indiscriminately quoting a whole thread
with their message at the top is why Kirk has had to put a five k
message size on the Speakup list.  Quoting can be useful when done well.
 When done indiscriminately and without thought, it's a waste of time
and resources.

Gene

>Just so.  I always put my comments at the top for that reason.  Then 
>anyone who need not read the source message  does not have to do this.
>Karen