[Tutor] Thanks a bunch (was Re: Tutor Digest, Vol 118, Issue 64)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 02:24:15PM -0500, eryksun wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 12:47 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > Did you really have to send an entire digest, without changing the title,
> > just to send this one line?
> 
> Gmail's composer top posts unless the text to quote is selected
> beforehand.
[...]

This explains the faux pas, it doesn't excuse it. Gmail is, in my 
opinion, a *terrible* mail client. It makes what should be easy hard, 
what should be hard impossible, and encourages the dumbing down of 
communication.

It is bad enough that non-technical people cannot control their email 
beyond clicking "Forward" and "Reply". But when people who have 
expectations of being programmers cannot even control what they send out 
as an email, well, that's just shameful. And Google has to take a large 
part of the blame for that.

On the other hand, even the best of us have made silly mistakes, sent an 
email to the wrong place, forgotten to change the subject line, left 
people out of the CC list, quoted too much or too little. To err is 
human, to forgive is humane. We've all made mistakes. What matters is 
not the mistake itself, but what comes next.

To the Original Poster, whoever you are... I hope you'll hang around 
here and learn something useful. Hopefully it will be good and effective 
email skills as well as Python programming.


-- 
Steven