why do forwards (email chain letters) always have messed up lines preceded by > > > >> ?
The “>>>” marks are supposed to help you keep track of who said what. You might be able to turn them off in your preferences.
If you reply to an e-mail the >s get added to the included original text
After 20 or so replies there will be 20 >s
In the far, far, distant past, when the net was flat, when uucp was hot stuff while html had never been heard of, and email addresses contained more excalmation points than the subject lines, people were unable to quote each other
Everthing was in plain text. When you quoted a person who had quoted another person, things could get confusing in emails, especially a series of email back and forth between two people, for instance. Computers were very, very slow, compared to now, so finding a way for a computer to automatically specify who said what had to be very simple.
Someone, somewhere thought of using some symbol at the beginning of a line to show you were quoting someone else. That way, when you had
you would get something like
Soandso wrote:
>multiply
>
>TheOtherDue wrote:
>>nested
>>
>>Soandso wrote:
>>>quotes
Different mailer programs had different symbols, but the > became the standard of the day. Mailers were pretty stupid, and wouldn’t check line lengths or anything. Programmers, being lazy[sup]*[/sup], cut and pasted old mailer code into more modern mailers that used markup languages to denote quotes. Most didn’t put in special code to automagically wrap text quoted in the older fashion, though some would put in some barebones code that would kind of do what you wanted, but you’d have to do some amount of cleanup.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ with it.
[sup]*[/sup]The Three Virtues of a Good Programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris
Punoqllads, you make it sound like it’s an obsolete technique, but as far as I know, it’s still the preferred one.
Yeah, I find it really annoying to get E-mail in HTML. Plain text is still the king.