&gt

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What in the world is “&gt”? It seems to be used all the time but I have no idea what it means.

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It can be a lot of things. In mathematics, it is a greater than sign and is used in logic and boolean algebra to indicate the relationship between two values. In English, it is another form of parenthesis and can be used like (), {}, or []. In email, it is normally used to indicate that the texte between it and a usually accompanying “<" or the end of the current line was copied from the email being replied to. Have you seen it in some other context, there are probably other meanings.

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in email, it is commonly used to indicate the quoted material.

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and in OL98, is set through the dialog accessed in Tools, Options, E-Mail Options, and the two dropdown boxes titled “When replying to a message” and “When forwarding a message”. When either of the “Prefix each line with” options are selected from those boxes, the default prefix character is “>”, set in the “Prefix each line with” box below.

Personally I don’t like or use prefix characters. I especially don’t like them after the second on each line. Before I dropped out of the BBS microsphere, all the good shareware offline readers had “smart quoting” where multiple quote characters were trimmed back to a single quote character. But now that we have nice professional retail corporate-built e-mail products, designers don’t have the skill, or time, or sense, or whatever, to solve such a simple problem.

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i don’t like them all that much either, but multiple sets of them would be greatly reduced if people trimmed replies instead of just hitting send.

what i hate even more is the indentation method. After a few replies the orginial is maybe 3 character long per line

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Hear, hear, to your second issue. I have nil competency to program OL, so I’m disappointed in the lack of macro capacity in OL98 (I understand that OL2k hasn’t any either.) Here’s what I OFTEN do MANUALLY with multiple indents:

select all text below my reply/forward,
click “unindent” button repeatedly until there are no indents,
click “indent” button (all old text is still selected) once only.

The effect is neat and clear to the reader.

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not sure what you mean by no macro capability, OL2000 does have VBA but no macro recorder. Most of the object model is exposed in OL2000, although a few things aren’t.

Good news is, more is exposed is OL10, unfortunately it may not be worth upgrading to. And it doesn’t have a macro recorder either.

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Oops, I lie. I think that was a TSE Pro macro that ran the smart quotes. Nevertheless, I stand by my rant!

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