Editing Posting style (section)

===Quoted line prefix===
[[Image:MsOutlook-EmailOptions.png|thumb|right|Alternative e-mail quoting styles supported by Microsoft Outlook]]

A common convention in plain-text email is to prefix each line of the quoted text with a distinctive character or string.  As of 2020 (and for many years previously), the [[greater-than sign]] ("<code>&gt;</code>", the [[wikt:canon|canonical]] prefix)<ref name="rfc3676#section-4.5">R. Gellens (February 2004), '''RFC 3676''' [[rfc:3676#section-4.5|''The Text/Plain Format and DelSp Parameters'']]</ref> is almost universally used; but other characters such as the [[ASCII]] [[vertical bar]] character ("<code>|</code>") have been used as well, sometimes with one or more spaces inserted before or after the quoted text marker.

There is no standard declaring one quote-prefix to be "right" and others to be "wrong", but some standards depend on conventional quoting. The "never issued" and obsolete [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1849.html "son-of-1036"] draft RFC 1849 recommends "<code>&gt;</code>" as the quote-prefix; [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt RFC 3676] depends on it and considers "<code>&gt;&gt;&nbsp;</code>" and "<code>&gt;&nbsp;&gt;&nbsp;</code>" to be semantically different. That is, "<code>&gt;&gt;&nbsp;</code>" has a quote-depth of two, while "<code>&gt;&nbsp;&gt;&nbsp;</code>" has a quote-depth of one, quoting a line starting with "&gt;". Most e-mail clients treat the two sequences as equivalent, however.

The convention of quoting was common in [[Usenet]] newsgroups by 1990, and is supported by many popular  [[User agent|email interfaces]], either by default or as a user-settable option. In [[Microsoft Outlook]], for instance, this behavior is controlled by an option labeled "Prefix each line of the original".  Besides inserting markers automatically in quoted lines, some interfaces assume that a line starting with a "<code>&gt;</code>" character or similar is quoted text, and will automatically display it in a distinctive font or color:

 <span style="color:red">> How is the report coming? --Mary</span>
 It will be on your desk by noon. --Joe

Sometimes the insertion of a quoted line marker will cause one original line to be folded as two lines in the reply, and the continuation line may not have the proper marker. To avoid ambiguity in such cases, one may consider inserting blank lines after each block of quoted text:

 <span style="color:red">>The board is asking again for the sales data. We really must provide</span>
 <span style="color:red">> them with some figures. How is the report coming? --Mary</span>
 
 It will be on your desk by noon. --Joe

Quoted line markers are most commonly used in plain-text messages. In HTML messages, other devices may be used to indicate quoted text, such as [[HTML element|HTML indentation element]]s like <code>[[Blockquote element|blockquote]]</code> or <code>dl</code>.