I finally remembered to disable unsupported authentication methods on Zaphod, so I won’t keep getting warnings that people are using bat-shit crazy SMTP authentication methods like NTLM.

I think I’m going to start automatically deleting every email that contains the string “-----Original Message-----”. If people can’t be bothered to quote emails sensibly, then I can’t be bothered to read them. Especially when their broken quoting habits lead to them quoting again, in the middle of the message, as well as at the bottom.

~/.procmailrc:

:0 B
* ^-----Original Message-----
/dev/null

When I reply to an email in mutt, it looks something like this:

On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 07:50:01AM -0000, Skippy wrote:

One line, containing the date and the author of the message I’m replying to. Nice and simple.

When Skippy, or anyone else using MS Outlook (or, presumably Outlook Express/Vista Mail), it looks like this:

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin A'Lee [mailto:bma@bmalee.eu]
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 11:48 PM
To: termilist@termisoc.org
Subject: Re: [TermiList] ati graphic cards

That’s one line that wouldn’t be necessary if Outlook didn’t encourage top-posting, two lines to give the information mutt managed to convey in one line, and two lines to give the information that should already be in the headers: a total of five lines where one will do. Plus, of course, the ?top-posting, which is an entry in itself.

This isn’t a complaint about you personally, Skippy (you just happened to be the person in the examples because you use Outlook). But it is a complaint about your choice of mailer. Outlook sucks, please use a proper mailer.

It is completely unnecessary to attach 22 lines of disclaimer to the bottom of every email any of your employees send to anyone, not least because nobody gives a shit. And, as has been pointed out, there’s no way it could be delivered to someone it’s not addressed to, because that’s how email works (don’t get pedantic about envelope vs. body addresses here, I’m talking addresses in general not just the one in the actual headers, and assuming that their mailserver isn’t set up to forge addresses on outgoing mail…)

Well, somehow GMail mistook my attempt to import some of my old emails into it for an attempt to forward them all to the original recipient. Apologies if you’ve gotten old (probably TermiSoc-related) emails from 2005 or so.

Dear Microsoft,

Your cocking stupid excuse for a mail client is filling my server logs with shit. Please fix it now.

No love, bma