Jody Kravtitz sez:

> Please don't quote entire articles when referring to a previous
> message.  Its especially important that you don't quote an ENTIRE
> previous digest.  This has been happening a lot lately.

As moderator of another mailing list somewhat similar to a-m, I too
have had to deal with this problem.   For those of us reading and
responding to a-m digests through some form of offline mail reader that
operates under Windows on a DOS computer, I recently learned that
Windows has a neat feature that really simplifies the quoting process.

I've been using Windows for several years, and never knew till recently
that it is possible to "select" a portion of whatever I'm looking at by
holding down the "shift" key while mouse clicking on the top line of
target quote, then clicking on the bottom line of the target quote.
The selected portion will then be hi-lited which can then be "copied"
to the Windows clipboard through the EDIT drop-down menu selection.

Open a new message, rather than replying to the a-m digest, place the
cursor on character position 1, line 1 of message area, then "PASTE"
the selected quote from the Windows clipboard, using the PASTE function
from within the EDIT drop-down menu.   I then simply enter little ">"
characters at beginning of each quoted line to finish it off.

I find this to be a dramatically simpler way of replying to something
contained within an a-m digest.    The ordinary "reply" function picks
up the whole of the incoming a-m digest and drops it into the new
reply, forcing very time consuming select and delete functions to bring
the reply back down to a manageable size.

Since learning of this neat little Windows feature, I've discussed it
with a number of people, some quite computer literate, who were unaware
of it.    If you're not already familiar with it, give it a whirl,
you'll enjoy it.

Regards,

Terry

•Terry Smythe                    (204) 832-3982 (voice/fax)
55 Rowand Avenue                smythe@mts.net
Winnipeg, MB, Canada   R3J 2n6  smythe@freenet.mb.ca
Home page: http://www.mts.net/~smythe