Adam Sjøgren <asjo@koldfront.dk> writes:

> I've had people think I forgot to write anything, because they could not
> see my reply before the quoted text.

This happens to me constantly also.  And that really is the problem --
not the debate about whether traditional quoting is functional or not,
but the user astonishment when they see it for the first time.  They
think it's you who does not know who to use email, and yes, one common
form of that is to think that you sent them an empty reply.  Even
trimming the message down to only the relevant parts makes them think
you're some kind of screwball.

It doesn't help that aside from Thunderbird, there do not seem to be any
commonly used GUI mailreaders that even allow you to traditional quote
without doing a lot of hand-editing, and even Thunderbird doesn't do it
by default.  It's become almost entirely something people using terminal
based mailreaders like Gnus, Alpine, Mutt, etc. do, because only they
have software that gives you much of a choice about it.  What are we
supposed to tell the vast masses of people that will only use a large
GUI mailreader?  You must use Thunderbird (with a non-default reply
quotes setting), because it's the law?

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ Sr. UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ James Franck Institute +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ Materials Research Ctr +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky