>I imagine that any listowner who has repeatedly cajoled, pleaded, begged
>that subscribers stop the totally useless wholesale quoting has at times
>wished for that.  I certainly have, though I've never asked for it.
>Of course, the subscribers will NOT like it.

I'm not sure you realize that changing the quoting character is a simple
point and click operation with all the GUI mail programs I have used (but
admittedly I've hardly tried them all). It defaults to '>' but you can easily use
something else. You can't rely on the fact that most users will not know
that this is possible, because one will and spreading knowledge is what
mailing lists are all about :-) Lazy users will by definition do what takes
them the least amount of time, which is to change the quoting character,
and it is no longer an obscure .blah_rc operation with a cryptic syntax
that only a techie stands a chance of understanding. Usenet has shown
that this will not work unless you start kicking users off for changing
their quoting character. Personally I would never delete a user for this
reason, I mean, who am I to tell people what character to use to quote
their message??? I would be mad if I got the boot from a list because
the list owner decided that the official quoting character is the colon and
my mail program doesn't do it this way! I would make sure that this
policy were shown in, ah, the proper light, and the list owner would be
sorry :-) No, I would just kick users off for overquoting, regardless of
the character they used, which is why I have never wished for this
feature. I know that down the line I am going to have to give the worst
offenders the boot so that the rest of the group realizes that maybe I
am serious when I say I don't want excessive quotes, and that the only
difference is whether we play a little cat and mouse game before or
we just do it right away. I also don't police quote length unless it gets
really outrageous, because I know that many people will NOT resubmit
when the quote police punted them, but that is a more personal
decision, based in part on the fact that I only host lists at sites that
have plenty of disk space because it is so cheap nowadays.
If I ran lists on a host with limited disk space, I would police the quotes
for sure. There are other methods by the way, for instance in a previous
job I used to refuse to answer messages with excessive quoting,
and people quickly figured out the equation. They could spend 5 sec
removing the 2000 lines of quotes, or they could save 5 sec but
actually end up having wasted 5 min typing a message I would not
answer, and then finding out the answer from the manuals. In a few
weeks I had "convinced" hundreds of people of the necessity to
avoid excessive quoting :-) This was better than making a fuss because
"You don't understand, my mail program this and that, anyway I have
the right to write the way I want!" and you can spend ages having a
discussion that just goes nowhere.

  Eric