On Sat, 13 Jul 2019 13:25:38 -0700 (PDT), Thomas RUX <xxxxxx@comcast.net>
wrote:

>I have to disagree you can leave out quoting part of the thread. There have
>been a number of topics that I've tried to follow and reply to but did not
>have any idea of what the original topic was. Wading through the thread was
>not much help either.

If that happens, it means that the trimming of quotes has been excessive,
not judicious - and yes, for some people, it might be easy to go from one
to the other.

What 'judicious' means _needs_ to be person-dependent. If "Billy-joe-bob"
is using a client that breaks or omits the "references" and "in-reply-to"
headers, or ignores them on incoming mail, he needs to trim _less_, because
he's going to be breaking threads and/or dealing with broken threads left
and right. There are a couple of people on the list that are in this boat,
and some webmail providers (especially one that used to be hot, and now
offers an enterprise mail service with a number as part of its name) are
particularly evil about this. Similarly if one is replying to the digest -
but even then, trim out messages from the digest that you're _not_ replying
to.

As general rules of thumb, I use "if I'm not replying to that particular
point, I'm not quoting that particular point" and "if it's more than three
levels of quoting, I probably shouldn't quote it". Often, I don't quote
more than two levels - but sometimes the third level is useful. The fourth
level rarely is, so you'll always see "> ..." in my replies, often ">>
...", and occasionally ">>> ..." - but never ">>>> ...". And sometimes, if
I think that the quoting will be too much even within my rule, I might not
quote, but instead summarize within brackets (e.g., "[a good exposition on
how not to quote]"). Those rules seem to have worked for me for more years
than I'd care to admit to - but they did take time for me to develop, from
experience and observation.

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