On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Wayne Smith wrote: > ... When people had 300 baud modems and really dumb mail > reading software, every character seemed to count. Now with > faster links, what's the gain in worrying about including some > junk at the end of a post? Your point about speed of transmission is well-taken. But, when a list exists for purposes of discussion, with give-and-take replies to earlier postings, we need to consider the time it takes for the people replying to wade through the text (to make sure there are no embedded comments, to make sure there is no _intended_ context in that large text for the comments from the person being replied to which should be understood, and for the time it takes then for the respondent to delete the unnecessary blocks of text (not always at the "end") so that his reply doesn't also create an even more convoluted read/edit for the next person to reply. Peter