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The Case for Properly Attributing Quotations in Emails

The Unambiguous "Martha > "

By , About.com Guide

We want to make sure it is clear for every line in an email who authored it. To achieve this, let's add the name to it. If we put the name of the original sender before the quoted text and use the conventional '>' character to separate it from the text itself, that should do the job quite nicely.

It could look something like this:

Martha > the originator of a quoted line becomes
Martha > particularly apparent in lengthier emails
Martha > where the ...said... is at the beginning
Martha > of the mail and thus without sight.
Tom > What about remembering who said what?
Martha > What's the point of quoting then?

This time it's a break point.

As you can see, what we have lost are the levels of indentation. Since every line is preceded by the name of its author, they are not needed, though.

A caveat that makes this quoting style that properly attributes text less legible is the zigzaggy line that is the beginning of the quoted messages:

     |

     |
         |
        |

A way to avoid this is a fixed length of attributional characters. Each name can be shortened to four characters, for example, or initials (and filling spaces) can be used.

Mart > The problem of identifying
Tom > Why would you want to do that?
Tim > I'd like to know what nonsense you talk.
Mart > There's no sense in knowing nonsense, is
Mart > there?

How do you *know* what is nonsense then?

Implementations of Attributing Quoting

Though it seems a sensible thing to do, the quoting method just described is not particularly wide spread. Of all the major email programs only The Bat! offers (and even promotes) it.

If you use an Emacs email client (like Wanderlust), you can use the Supercite package, which is no longer in active development, though.

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