Avast me hearties, There have been numerous (OK, two) questions lately about how to properly quote and edit a post to which you are replying. Rick Austin has already been kind enough to provide some help on this but there are a couple of things I'd like to add. First, what needs to be quoted and what needs to be snipped? Before you even hit the reply key, try to think if your reply is going to advance the discussion at hand. If your post only pertains to the person who wrote the original post then it's probably better to respond privately. Likewise, if you are replying out of anger do it in private and encourage the other person to do the same (IMHO Flame wars in a forum such as this are unseemly). Conversely, if all you want to do is agree with someone that can be done privately as well. What needs to be quoted? As little as possible while still letting the reader know what you are replying to. More often than not this means that almost no quoting at all is needed. What needs to be snipped? 1. The header material that some e-mail programs append to the body of the message. You might leave the "from" information intact but the rest is either redundant or unimportant. 2. The originator's sig. It's redundant as well. [While we're on the subject of sig's I'd like to make an appeal for short ones; The generally accepted size for a sig is four lines or less. Remember it's a sig, not an autobiography.] 3. Anything else that isn't pertinent to your post. If the originator asks 5 questions and you're only answering one of them, why quote the other 4? Likewise if you're replying to one sentence about an inverter problem in a three page cruise report then you only need to quote that one sentence (it might be appropriate to change the subject line as well). Once you've decided on what stays and what goes, how do you get rid of the stuff you don't want? If your e-mail program supports it you might consider setting it up to NOT include any quoted material from the original post. In this mode you cut the material of interest out of the original and paste it into your reply. If that doesn't appeal to you then the alternative is to erase everything that you don't need. To do that, use the following steps: 1. Put the mouse pointer at the beginning of the text you want to eliminate. 2. Click and hold the left mouse button. 3. Drag the mouse pointer (while still holding the left mouse button) to the end of the text. 4. The text you are getting rid of should now be highlighted. 5. Release the left mouse button. 6. Press the delete key. VOILA! This procedure works for just about any PC based text manipulation, if you have a Mac the procedure is probably almost identical (don't Macs have just one mouse button?). One other thing I'd like to point out about this: It's really a quick and easy process to do this sort of editing. When you see the instructions written out it sounds like a major headache but it isn't. I snip the heck out of all my replies (trying to set a good example doncha know) and I NEVER spend more than five to ten seconds at it. OK. So why is it so important to snip? Because it's polite. Polite, that is, to three different groups. 1. Listees who have slow or expensive connections. We've all seen the many threads on how to get e-mail at sea and one thing has been common to all - that e-mail at sea is slow AND expensive and that it's not likely to change soon. It also would come as no surprise if some of our colleagues outside North America weren't afforded the Internet luxuries many of us take for granted. 2. Listees who take the digest version of the list. If you get an e-mail with a ton of quoted stuff you probably read what you want and dump the rest, but if you read the digest that same ton of quoted stuff CAN'T be ignored. You have to scroll through the whole thing to find the start of the next message. That scrolling wouldn't be a big deal if it only happened occasionally but when it happens 3 to 6 times a day it can become irritating. 3. List hosts. Georgs has asked that quoting be kept to a minimum and when your host asks you to do something it's only polite to comply. TIA for helping the list to run smoothly. Alex Hirsekorn Trawler World Help Team

alexh@gte.net writes: >This procedure works for just about any PC based text manipulation, >if you >have a Mac the procedure is probably almost identical (don't Macs >have just >one mouse button?). Decidedly so: MacMice have one button, one tail, one ball and one eye (in the shape of a partly chomped up apple). But our keyboard has one extra key - the command key - and once discovered, you'll never buy another WinTel machine.... George of Scaramouche P.s: "PocketMail", which many voyagers use falls in the category of "No Lengthy Quotes Please" since it uses Payphones or Cellphones (slow). However it has a neat option to read the subject lines and then mark only those posts you want to see. On the second access you then get those marked posts in full. Works very, very well! scaramouche1@pocketmail.com