[Coco] One point of view

[Wayne Campbell]

I have spent alot of time online since 1996, when I first made the move from BBSes (StGNet) and Information Networks (Delphi, Compuserve, AOL) to the Internet. I have dealt with at least a million emails, dozens of online chat rooms (irc was my home for about three years), moderated chat room channels and have founded chat rooms and forums.

I have learned alot about how messages are structured, and what (at least, to me) makes for the best, fastest and easiest forms that they take. I would like to share with all of you what I consider to be a well-constructed email, easy to read, fast in read-time, and reduction of overall size. As much as todays computers don't care how big the message is, when you are wading through 25K of message thread history to get to a one-line response, it matters.

I am not saying that anyone MUST adhere to what I am proposing, I am just giving my point of view. If you agree, you agree. If you don't, you don't.

Message Order:

An email message should be ordered. Its order determines how easily it is read, and how quickly you can get through it and on to the next. When you see traffic from a list like this, you can have 50 messages to read by the time you check your email again.

The Order:

New topic or response to previous post

This is where you type a new message, and this is where you type a response to a previous message. By having the response at the top of the message, it gets read FIRST. When it's a one-liner, like "I agree", you know you can move on immediately, unless you want to know more about the topic and read through the history.

If you want or need to quote the text you are replying to, copy the RELEVANT portion of the history, and paste it in this section. The usual format is:

Quoted text
Response text

You can repeat that format as many times as you need to quote responses to differing parts of the previous post. Try to keep the quoted text down to a maximum of two lines. You don't have to quote an entire paragraph to create a pointer to the part you are responding to. If the reader wants to read more, they can search for that text and then read the whole thing.

Quotes can be as short as "replaced HPUT with HGET", and that is enough to know that the response involves programming the CoCo. I can search for that in the history below the response to read the entire message if I want to, or skip it if I don't.

If response, body of message history

This is where the topic history should be. If there's something in the topic you want or need to read more about, you can scroll down until you find it. By putting the history here, you reduce the amount of time it takes to get through a message.

In addition, there are times when a topic history can become too long. My recommendation is, if the history reaches 25K:

1 leave the LAST response in the history section of the message
2 archive the remaining part in a zip file
3 attach the zip file to the message

The last response is most likely what is being replied to. This process can be repeated each time the text in the message reaches 25K. The attachment will grow in size as each segment of the history gets added, but will be smaller than the message would be with the entire content added.

I believe this list supports attachments, as I see them in signature files continually from this list.