As one can surmise from the previous test posts, I’ve been trying (after three quarters of a year) to fix the problems with my Movable Type installation.

I went to one of the providers listed at MT as consultants, to try to get some help (unnamed, to protect the guilty). They have been somewhat helpful, in that they have eliminated possibilities of what the problem might be, but they haven’t actually determined what the problem is ($150 later, and asking for more).

But that’s not the point. The point is the (to me) user hostility of their system.

When I get an email from them, it comes in the following form:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

[message from unnamed service…]

In my first response, I ignored it, and just replied below (as I always do, since as a long-time emailer, I bottom post to response).

The response was:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

Hi

Your reply was blank. I’m assuming this is because you were trying to quote
me instead of deleting everything and then replying. Please give it a try
again by deleting all the original text.

Oh. OK.

They were serious.

They were determined to allow nothing that they emailed me to be quoted in my response. And moreover, even if I top posted, they didn’t want to see their response in my response.

Is it just me, or are they nuts?

Here was my second email in response to this absurd and deliberate policy (the first was minimal, and unreplied to):

One other point. Do you realize how annoying it is to:

1) not include my response in your response and

2) make me jump through hoops to include your response in mine?

Not to mention top posting (though in this case, it’s almost meaningless to distinguish between top and bottom posting).

WHY DO YOU DO THIS?

Do you think that it enhances the customer relationship?

This alone is almost enough to make me want to write off my current investment in you as a bad one, and find someone who can help me without being such an email PITA.

The response?

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.

Here is my response:

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
==========================================================

Yes, because bandwidth for a few lines of text is so expensive…

It is important because I would like to have some context for what I’m responding to, and you should have some context for what you’re responding to, in the email to which you’re responding. If I want to find out what we’re talking about, I have to go back and dig into my outbox, to figure out WTF we’re talking about. If you don’t find this annoying, I don’t frankly understand why. If you don’t want excessive repetition, just delete the older stuff. That’s how it worked on Usenet for years.

===========================================================

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.
===========================================================

Then you must have worked with thousands of top-posting morons raised on Outlook and AOL, and who only know how to upload to blogs with FTP, thus opening themselves to attack. It drives old-timers like me, familiar with old-school email and Usenet, NUTS.
I have never before run into a system that MADE IT DIFFICULT (AND ATTEMPTED TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE, EVEN WARNED RESPONDENTS NOT TO DO IT) TO QUOTE AN EMAIL IN RESPONSE. This is a new, and infuriating system to me.

Can you point me to anyone else who has deliberately and maliciously set up their email responses this way, because it is a novel and off-putting approach, that has been making me angry with each exchange? I’ve been sort of happy with you, in that you seem to be attempting to help, even though you have made no progress whatsoever in solving my problem, other than telling me what it isn’t, but you can’t imagine how frustrating this is. Deliberately attempting (in futility, obviously) to make it impossible to include context of email responses is, to me, insane.

That’s where it stands at this point. Who is nuts?