The Lois Bujold list is received by people outside the USA who pay by the byte to download.
It is received by several people who must print hard copy to read it.
Both of these groups were troubled by excessive quoting and the list developed a quote policy:-
Quote length should be minimised and quotes should be paraphrased where possible.
Headers and sigs. should never be included unless they are directly relevant to the reply.
In general quotes should be no longer than the post they accompany, and, especially,
a long post should not be quoted in full in order to post a single line response.
Quotes which have long lines should be edited to less than
60 characters
so that the resulting quotations, after line cutting, which
can occur
in a number of email programs, does not cause the final
quoted text
to look like this.
Nested quotes should be edited to identify the "speakers", rather than relying on multiple >>>>s. e.g:
JB > Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.
SC > Barbrhu, barbrhu, barbrhu, barbrhu, barbrhu.
RS > Brouhaha, brouhaha, brouhaha, brouhaha, brouhaha.
I have never yet discovered email software which prevents the trimming of quotes - it may
sometimes take a little ingenuity and a little extra trouble - but, AFAIK, it can be
done.
Do remember that a little trouble for one person spares our hundreds of list members
the irritation of a post which is much harder to make sense of.
Some time ago I agreed to act as the list's "quote pixie" to remind people, OFF-LIST,
who quoted more than was really necessary, in the interests of those list members with the problems I mentioned.
I had better warn you that there's an "Off-Topic Thug" too, who will jump on you
if you don't use the header "OT:" (note that the colon is essential) when making an off-topic post to the list.
James Bryant - the quote pixie