| From: William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> | Personally, I usually delete if I don't see poster's writing in first | screen. Of course, with exception. I know Hugh always bottom post, so | I hold off delete to 3rd screen. That's kind. But what kind of screen do you have? Of the almost 2000 posts I've made to the lists since October 1999, only 11 have had more than 24 non-header lines before the first line that matched this pattern: '^[^|]'. Do you have less than 12 lines on your screen? Perhaps you use a GUI MUA that squanders screen space. I created an mbox file with the postings. I called it 99. Then I ran: <99 formail +1 -I "" -s grep -m 1 -n '^[^|]' \ | sed -e 's/:.*//' 999 | sort -n | uniq -c This gave me a histogram of lengths. For technical reasons, you need to subtract two from each of the lengths. So the length "2" is for messages with no initial quoting. When I quote, I generally leave a blank line before my response. So how could there be messages with "3" as a length? In both those cases I accidentally started my message with an extra blank line (no quote). 512 2 2 3 74 4 13 5 186 6 300 7 219 8 148 9 134 10 100 11 68 12 44 13 41 14 28 15 22 16 24 17 6 18 14 19 4 20 4 21 7 22 5 23 4 24 3 25 2 26 4 27 1 29 1 30 3 31 My mail-reading window normally is tall enough that in every case, some of the actual content would show on the first page. For example, it is now 89 lines (not set for this message). My monitor allows 124 lines. All this with the default Gnome Terminal font.