Cris Pierry offers a good tip on his blog for leaner and smarter replies and forwards.

By default Apple Mail quotes all the text of the original email in a reply. But if you select a portion of text in an email before you hit reply or forward, the reply will only contain the text that you select from the longer original, like this:

Obviously this is a bandwidth-friendly habit. It is also a good habit for two other reasons that occur to me straight-away:

1. Sometimes I send an email with more than one question in it (breaking one of the rules of “Keeping Email Simple”). A reply that quotes just a selection of what I said, helps me to work out which question the person is replying to.
2. Selecting text before forwarding is important if you work in a place where colleagues will mix important information with gossip and racy rumours about other workmates. Here, the Select and Forward approach is crucial.

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• Forward only selected attachments
• Gmail’s new interface, shortcuts and Safari

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 27th September, 2005 at 6:48 am and is filed under Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.