What is sometimes called "promiscuous quoting" has long puzzled me. Is
editing the text copied into a reply so annoyingly difficult with the
popular mail software, or is it just simple laziness? (Surely, I hope, all
Qalamites know how to highlight blocks of text and delete them!)

The only justifications for extensive quoting that I can think of are: 1)
As a courtesy, in a long-delayed reply, to readers who have partly or
completely forgotten the context, or 2) Legal, business, or
standard-setting org. transactions, in which a record of earlier text can
be desirable or important. (There might be others.)

In some Web circles (circles?), experienced users like to type <AOL>, a
parody referring to the clueless AOL subscribers who quote many screens of
text, and say, "me to" (no caps or punctuation, spelling of "too" being
unfamiliar...)

Any half-decent software will automatically place a [>] at the beginning
of each quoted line. Good software (such as Pine on *ix) will reflow
quoted text to fit the format, and still "prepend" the quote character.
(Opera e-mail doesn't do that, unfortunately; it makes one awful mess,
much of the time.)

While off topic, I also hope that all Qalamites know about [Bcc:] and when
to use it. I currently have four e-mail addresses, one for life, and three
have been compromised, now "out in the wild", possibly because of failure
to use [Bcc:].

As to threaded presentation of message listings, as far as I know, good
software uses both the internal message ID (or some other data in the full
header of the message) and the Subject line's content to decide how to
present the list of messages in a thread. The first of those is the
official way, I'm almost sure, while the second is a nice feature. A
thread shouldn't "break" in good software if the Subject line changes.

A.: Because that's how people normally read: Top line first, then down.
Q.: Why should a reply follow the quoted text?

{I'm falling behind, again; no complaints!}

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
who, after many years, is finally operating cursor and editing keys by
feel/touch
Opera 7.5 (Build 3778), using M2