I didn’t find a way to limit quote level when replying in evolution. Most of the time, quoting only the last message is sufficient, without including the whole history of replies. In order to limit mail size, it would be nice to be able to set a default depth level of quoting when replying.
I’m not sure I understand exactly what you are referring to, but the
“best” way to reply to a message with quoting is to select (with your
mouse) the text of the message that you want to reply to, THEN hit the
reply button.
When your reply composer window opens, only the text you selected will
be included in the reply and not the entire message.
Is that what you were looking for?
1 Like
I suspect the OP means the option for including everything at the end
of the reply, in the broken MS Outlook sense. It’s something you can
turn off in the Discourse preferences.
As you say, people accustomed to mailing lists already know that this
is bad form, and they should use the selective quoting you mention.
Yet another reason I dislike the whole Discourse setup and try to avoid
it where possible.
poc
Hi, thank your for your answers. I’ll try to clarify my suggestion
In the general preference from the editor, you have
- “Quoted”
- “Inside body” (outlook style)
- “attachment”
- “No quote”
Not sure this are the exact terms, my interface is in french.
When you choose “Quoted”, it quote the whole text you’re replying to, even if this text includes quotes from previous messages. Most of the time I want to quote the whole last message (the one i’m replying to, because it helps me and my reader knowing what i’m writing about). But I want to discard all the previous quotes (the whole history of previously sent mails about same subject). Maybe the title “limit quote depth” would have been better for this thread
I knew about selecting text then hit “reply” button, but for me this would mean selecting each time the same thing: the last reply excluding previous quotes. I can also trunk quoted text manually in the editor with a few keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Shift+End then Del). But I think it would be helpful to be able chose quote depth in general options, and click “reply” without having to select anything or delete in the editor. Then, if I want to quote whole text I can select it all, but that would happen in very few cases.
Regards
I don’t see anything whatsoever in the OPs message to make me think
they are talking about Discourse. The message clearly says, “when
replying in evolution”. It’s highly unlikely they mean “when replying
TO DISCOURSE in evolution”.
I think peoples’ dislike of Discourse is causing them to read things
into messages that aren’t actually there.
However, it’s clear from our responses that we don’t actually
understand WHAT the OP is concerned about so we should leave it at that
until they provide more clarification.
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I’m not aware of any “maximum level of quotations to keep and magically drop any lines on quotation levels above that threshold when replying in the mail composer” setting in Evolution. Closest coming to my mind is Don't show blockquote indicators on both sides for 6th+ level (#445) · Issues · GNOME / evolution · GitLab . You could file a feature request in GNOME GitLab, however I’d personally decline this one as it’s up to email authors to strip irrelevant quotes, no matter on which level they were or became irrelevant. Something written 10 emails ago might still be relevant for the conversation, something written in the very last email might not be.
This is an interesting idea, but I personally don’t think I would find
it useful. It’s extremely rare that I want to quote the entirety of
the parent message, but at the same time none of message(s) prior to
that (grandparent messages).
90% of the time, I just want to quote a part of the parent message.
The other 10% of the time, I want to quote part of the parent message
PLUS some portion of the grandparent message that the parent message
also quoted.
In both of these situations “select / reply” does the job better.
I also think implementing this feature could be tricky. It’s one thing
to say “the entire message should be indented as a single quoted
block”. It’s an entirely different thing to try to parse the message
and break it up into separate blocks, that could be included or
excluded based on the level of quoting. It’s not clear that, given all
the different formats for quoting, you could even do this reliably.
If that’s the case, then I apologise. I replied because I got the mail
via Discourse and so assumed the OP was using it. The fact that most of
what I get from Discourse via email has no context whatever (aside
from the Subject line) makes it prone to confusion IMHO.
poc
In fact I was talking about “evolution mail software”, not about discourse.
Newbie question: what is “OP message” ?
Did I post to the wrong place? It seemed to me this was the place to discuss about projects linked to Gnome and its software ecosystem, so I choosed the “Applications” category, and “evolution” tag.
If that’s the case, then I apologise. I replied because I got the
mail via Discourse and so assumed the OP was using it.
They were, certainly, USING Discourse. But that doesn’t mean they were
talking ABOUT Discourse, rather than talking about Evolution…?
The goal of the switch to Discourse is that people use it to ask
questions about Evolution, not Discourse… at some point anyway…
The fact that most of what I get from Discourse via email has no
context whatever (aside from the Subject line) makes it prone to
confusion IMHO.
By “context” do you mean the Evolution list name in the subject, versus
the supremely useless “Applications” category? Or something else?
Luckily for me I subscribe to only one application tag in Discourse so
I know everything that appears in my inbox with this “Applications”
category in the subject is actually about Evolution.
Newbie question: what is “OP message” ?
“OP” is shorthand for “original post” or “original poster”. A simple
way to talk about the original question, versus some other response.
Did I post to the wrong place? It seemed to me this was the place to
discuss about projects linked to Gnome and its software ecosystem, so
I choosed the “Applications” category, and “evolution” tag.
It is the right place, for some definition of “right”.
Gnome is in the middle of shutting down all of its traditional email
servers and switching over to use Discourse instead. A number of
people who like the traditional mailing lists and are now being forced
to use Discourse (or leave) are salty about it 
and using any
opportunity to register their displeasure. You kind of stepped into
the middle of that. It’s nothing you did or didn’t do.
Cheers!
[1] Full disclosure: I am absolutely on the side that Discourse is
objectively worse and the mailing lists should have been preserved.
By context I mean something quoted from the post being replied to, as
is pretty much expected on mailing lists, though not always followed.
poc
Efforts are under way to find a new home for the Evolution mailing
list. Hopefully we’ll have some news in the next week or so.
Unfortunately that will mean some fragmentation, but there doesn’t
appear to be any way around it.
poc
Then set up your options on discourse properly, so you have the context of the previous message when responding.
But… it wasn’t a reply, it was an original question. Never mind. I
don’t understand but it’s not worth worrying about.
For the fun of it, when you save the following code blob as ~/.local/share/evolution/webkit-editor-plugins/com.example.CutQuotationLevel.js, then the next time you’ll reply to anything all the quotes for level higher than 2 will be automatically dropped. Play with the keepUpToLevel to find the accurate value for you.
Note of Evolution: Webkit editor plugin broken since 3.46.1 too.
I would attach the file, but this forum doesn’t let me attach .js files…
'use strict';
var comExampleCutQuotationLevel = {
name : "comExampleCutQuotationLevel.js",
setup : function(doc) {
if (doc.body) {
var keepUpToLevel = 2;
var selector = "blockquote[type=cite]";
while (keepUpToLevel > 0) {
keepUpToLevel--;
selector += " blockquote[type=cite]";
}
var elems = document.querySelectorAll(selector), ii;
for (ii = elems.length - 1; ii >= 0; ii--) {
elems[ii].remove();
}
}
}
};
EvoEditor.RegisterPlugin(comExampleCutQuotationLevel);
err, of course, strictly speaking, the above should use doc, not document, though it works too in this case.
It seems to me that quotes in emails are detectable…
Maybe find a UI to better present quotes with options to select one or more and select parts of them?
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