Mail/News client UI design (was: How to know what is fixed in an updated package ?)

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Friday, June 25, 2004 12:48 AM +0100 James Wilkinson 
<james at westexe.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> It's encouraged by Microsoft e-mail packages putting the cursor at the
> top of a new reply, with the "Original e-mail" underneath.

If you blindly put the cursor at the bottom, you get bottom-posting, which 
is almost as bad. Some user education is required to teach them to cut all 
the irrelevant stuff and to interleave responses point-by-point.

Xnews (a nice Win32 newsreader) has the nice feature that it bitches at you 
if too much of your post is quoted text. It also has a toolbar button that 
skips to the next unquoted paragraph, making it easy to navigate 
interleaved responses. (Are there any good Linux-based newsreaders 
comparable to Xnews?)