Truncate your replies
By default, when we reply to an email, we like to “quote” the original message to which we are replying. That’s the part with each line generally marked up with the character ‘>’.
It’s a nice thing to quote the original text to place our reply in context. But to make our reply nice and readable the following things are also important:
- Please delete all the advertisements & taglines from the quoted text. These ads were appended to your friend’s email by the mailing company whose outgoing server (SMTP) has been used to transmit the email. We don’t need to include those taglines & ads in our replies. So please remove text like
Do you Yahoo!?These just add to the bulk of the email.
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! - Try to insert your reply more specific in context to the quoted text. A classic example of this is when you are writing a reply to an email with lots of questions. It’s a good practice to place your answers inline with the particular question you are answering.
- Delete quoted text which has no relevance to your reply. If someone has written you an email with a long story and then asked a question which pertains to something else, you can safely delete that long story from the quoted text.
