phil ringnalda

If, like me, you got all excited about Ev’s post saying that active Blogger users were getting Gmail invites, and if, like me, you rushed off to sign in to Blogger for the first time in months, and if, like me, you were disappointed to find that not posting at all for months didn’t qualify as active use, you might want to, like me, bang out four or five posts to that abandoned test blog you never got around to deleting, and then, like me, wander back by Blogger a few days later. Worked for me (firstlast@gmail.com, without their suggested full stop between first and last).

First thoughts? Their spam filtering isn’t nearly good enough yet to not list the number of unread, undeleted spam messages in the menu. I only wanted to try it because someone said that the combination of threading and no need to ever delete anything made it great for subscribing to mailing lists, especially Yahoo! Groups! with! their! (oops) horrible web interface, ramming thousands of banners and skyscrapers and interstitials in your face as you try to find that message from two weeks ago that you thought was safe to delete. To add an address for Yahoo! Groups, you first have to verify it, so I had them send the verification Friday night, while I was already late leaving for the weekend, and then when it still hadn’t shown up by Monday, had them send it again. Eventually, I did figure out that Gmail had filtered it as spam (bad idea) and wasn’t bothering to tell me that there was something in my spam folder (really awful idea).

Once the messages started flowing, I ran into my second problem. Apparently Gmail’s quoting-in-reply function works on the theory of “When speaking to Romans…” – if you reply to a message which includes a sane reply:

John Doe wrote:
> Something or other.

then Gmail will reply with a sane quote:

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 21:00:38 -0700, Jane Roe <jane@example.com> wrote:
> ...

but if you reply to a message with an insane Outlook-style top-replying train-wreck quote already in it:

Yes it does, doesn't it?

-----Original Message-----
From: Jane Doe [mailto:jane@example.com]
Sent: April 21, 2004 2:58 PM
To: john@example.com
Subject: Top-replying is bad

Have you noticed that top-replying tends to rather reverse the flow of the conversation? Especially with a multi-line header between each quoted-in-full message.

John Doe
My big tiresome signature here

then Gmail assumes that you will want to talk to those Romans in their own language, and prepares you a nice upside-down, multi-line headered reply. I’d really like to have a setting for [ ] Never make me look like a moron in replies.

(Why so harsh about top-replies? I subscribe to two mailing lists in digest form, because I really need to see about one in thirty or forty messages. Both are heavily populated with top-repliers, who never look at what they are quoting, so by the end of an active thread, my digest may have ten or fifteen copies of the earliest messages, complete with signatures, disclaimers that the message is for the use of the original recipient only, and ads from free email services. Even if it doesn’t bother you with your individual message subscription and your uncapped broadband to have ten word messages that are several hundred KB, there’s still a reason why the geekiest of the geeks (you know, the ones who started using email on a TTY with a big roll of yellow paper?) don’t do it like that. The reason is, it’s evil. There’s nothing much wrong with using Outlook or Outlook Express (assuming you know how to set them up to not be virus-spewing annoyances), but you need to use Outlook-QuoteFix. I know, even your best friend never mentioned that your email makes you look like a moron, but, sorry, it does.)