rantlet, and a question for y'all

[jennlk]

I just got an email from somebody (with a yahoo.com address) who said that she had a hard time finding my responses, and that I should "highlight my responses or put them in a different color". WTF? She very helpfully enclosed an example, which I couldn't see because I don't have HTML enabled in my mailreader -- when I looked at it in Gmail I could see the colors. (I had interleaved paragraphs, with a ">" at the beginning of each quoted line and extra lines between paragraphs, something that I've been doing for well over a decade. While not as obvious as changing colors or font, I would think that this is sufficient indication. Then again, I have been doing email for quite a while.)

How do I politely say "it's not my fault you're using a mailreader that doesn't understand standard email protocol"? Or has standard email protocol changed that much? Is there even one any more? Am I an email dodo, doomed to irrelevance because I don't use a web-based email reader?

Comments

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

No easy answer to that, because my experience is that what works on one platform might not work on another, so a message that's clear online might not be on a smartphone, for instance.

I would suggest fully bottom posting rather than interleaving. Or responding as if you are interleaving underneath her top post and then delete the rest of the quoted text.