Talk:Posting style

Corperate footers?
Seems a good place to mention the 'netiquette' surrounding gratuitous corporate footers appended to emails on mailing lists. i.e., please don't! --Dan|(talk) 11:14, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Saying that an RFC is "just a request for comments" is like saying that evolution is "just a theory". What makes RFC 1855 "informational" is its category. 69.30.58.238 (talk) 22:56, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

"Canonical" quote mark?
A recent edit called the "&gt;" character "the canonical quote mark", apparently because the RFC 3676 calls it so.

However, that use of the adjective "canonical" is appropriate only because the RFC's proposal includes making "&gt;" the *only* valid quote mark, in the proposed "format=flowed" subtype of the "text/plain" MIME type. The RFC needs to make "&gt;" canonical in order to allow quoted lines to be cleanly unquoted, re-wrapped, and re-quoted. I do not think that "&gt;" can be called "canonical" outside that RFC, except perhaps in the loose sense of "most widely used option".

By the way, observing that the previous edition of this proposal (RFC 2646, 1999) failed to get wide approval and is being retracted, I suspect that RFC 3676 will not become a standard either. Its proposal will only work perfectly if all participants in a discussion use agents that are compliant to it, and only if the original message is generated and tagged as "format=flowed". Even those agents will not work properly with the gazillion older messages that are sitting in people's folders and internet archives, which are either non-compliant or not tagged as "flowed". Note that any failure of a mail agent to properly handle quoted text in a non-compliant message will be perceived by users (rather rightfully, I would say) as a "bug" of the agent, rather than of the message. All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 04:22, 15 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Nope. text/plain; format=flowed is very carefully designed to be compatible with the normal text/plain format.  It is widely used by Mac OS mail clients.  And RFC 2646 is not "being retracted", as you claim, it's been obsoleted by 3676, with the latter a superset of the former. Jec (talk) 20:54, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060422215500/http://www.lemis.com:80/email.html to http://www.lemis.com/email.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070927233341/http://www.usenet-replayer.com/faq/alt.games.generals.html to http://www.usenet-replayer.com/faq/alt.games.generals.html

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Proposed merge of Usenet quoting into Posting style
this unsourced article stub is mostly already covered in Posting_style fgnievinski (talk) 16:39, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I think you mean Posting style. --84.241.139.251 (talk) 12:11, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh, never mind, that's the relevant subsection inside the section you mentioned. --84.241.139.251 (talk) 12:12, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Support. Usenet quoting already mentions that it is generic enough for both Usenet and email, the same as Posting style. Maiacosis (talk) 18:13, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
 * ✅ Klbrain (talk) 15:43, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Note, though, that there was little to merge, as most was duplicated and none of it was referenced! Klbrain (talk) 15:43, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

BBS?
During the Bulletin Board System (BBS) era, a common quoting style was to begin a line with the initials of the poster, followed by a ">"; this made it very easy to see who was responding to whom.

aen> text (comment by Alfred E. Neuman) jss> aen> text (comment by AEN, quoted by John Stewart Stutz) jss> text (response by jss) Should the article discuss that style, or is that TMI? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 11:11, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Do you have reliable source(s)? Might make the add/not add decision easier. --84.241.139.251 (talk) 12:15, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

Recommend to Stick with it
"Because Mom usually adds comments at the top of an email response. So if one day she adds a comment to the bottom, I probably wouldn't expect / notice it." Jidanni (talk) 07:01, 16 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Are you suggesting that this be added to the article? —Tamfang (talk) 23:15, 16 July 2024 (UTC)