[kde-linux] In KMail templates how to eliminate the > symbols

[Duncan]

Steve Smoult <steve.smoult at laposte.net> posted
200907100827.29839.steve.smoult at laposte.net, excerpted below, on  Fri, 10
Jul 2009 08:27:29 +0200:

> I refer to the reply template which will not accept a blank in the
> "quote indicator" and adds a > for each reply.  So after a series of
> mails I have a >>>>>> and so on.

The individual words make sense, but I fail to see the problem.

If you're quoting six levels deep (which in most cases you shouldn't be 
as it will normally be summarized out, by then, quote only the context 
you are replying to, not the whole mail, including all previous mails, 
etc...), how would /you/ signify that it's the six-level deep quote, and 
not the five-level-deep quote or the seven-level deep quote?

Similarly, the line wraps shouldn't ordinarily be a problem as the quotes 
get deeper nested, both because it's traditional to wrap at 72 chars or 
so originally to allow several levels of quote before it hits that magic 
80 char per line limit, and because modern clients should dynamically 
rewrap (and by that I don't mean leave jaggies!) in most contexts if 
necessary.  Also,, again, by the third quote level, normally quotes are 
already highly excerpted or summarized, and few quotes survive to the 
fourth level or higher anyway, because by then, they're seldom apropos to 
the ongoing conversation any longer.

Least-wise that's been the case for years (since the 80-char limit was 
the physical limit of the display) for both newsgroups and mailing lists, 
and for private mail, there's even less reason to maintain N degrees of 
quote.

So six levels of quote will (or should be) be extremely rare, and where 
they do exist, likely due to some artificial constraint such as the 
occasional support context caution I've seen to include the entire 
previous conversation (what, they don't have archives to look it up in?), 
well, artificial and not so pretty constructs are then par for the 
artificially constrained course.

Also, most reasonably modern clients (including kmail) color-code the 
quote levels based on the number of quote indicators, so it's quite easy 
to tell the quote levels apart simply by their color -- provided the 
quote indicator has been included reliably and someone along the line 
didn't include some off-the-wall strange delimiter that breaks the 
pattern.

I thus don't see the problem.  But perhaps I've missed it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman