In the old days of the Internet, conserving bandwidth was sacred. When people had a 2400-baud connection, gratuitous bits and bytes were avoided, since it added to download time. People never included the previous message in their e-mail because, presumably, you knew what you said. If you referred to a particular passage, you’d cut and paste it in and include a notation that it was copied in.
Now with ultra high-speed connections, some of these little Internet courtesies have fallen by the wayside. E-mails go back and forth with literally 20 e-mails included within them. After a point, this endless automatic inclusion becomes ridiculous and it increases the size of your e-mail storage. If you think about it, you are storing the same e-mail 20 times. It’s not efficient, even if you have a large hard disk.
Sometimes including the entire prior e-mail in a reply makes sense, especially with one-time communications. But with people that you communicate with daily, we like to think that you can at least remember what you said yesterday. Including the text of the e-mail is turned on by default in programs like Microsoft Outlook, but you can turn it off. In my e-mail program, I’m able to set it so that the software prompts me to choose whether or not I want to include the text of the prior e-mail in my reply. That gives me the best of both worlds.
Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook Express isn’t quite that smart. But if you want to save bandwidth and storage space, you can tell it not to include the sender’s message in your reply. To turn off the setting, choose Tools|Options. In the Send tab, remove the checkmark next to Include message in reply.
Maybe it’s sort of old fashioned to cut and paste in only the text you are referring to in your reply, but often I find it’s easier to tell what someone is talking about. I also think it’s somewhat more professional. The whole point of e-mail is to communicate. Anything that helps clarify communication is a good thing.