Disable quoting altogether

No, there is no such feature. I've noticed that Apple Mail has this feature, but I really don't understand why.

I know you are requesting this on behalf of your clients, but can you explain why they find it annoying (to be honest, I would be more than “annoyed” if I received unqouted replies myself). Quoting is important to clearly see who wrote what. It's been like this for 40 years of email and numerous features of various email clients rely on it.

Technically, it would be easy to offer this as a general feature, but I really do not want to encourage its use. If implemented I would prefer that it was on a per-recipient level, that is, MailMate would learn which recipients prefer this quoting style.

(Note that you can use ⌘A and then ⌥⌘' to decrease the quote level of a reply.)

The folks that complain to me do so about emails for when there are many replies. In these cases, the indents become progressively more prominent with each reply, to the point where the initial email is severely shifted to the right, affecting readability. One might argue that such a thread is best suited to a different communications medium, but that's a discussion for another time.

I can see the point of their argument. I don't find that the lack of increased quoting affects readability all that much; there is already reasonable clear delineation between emails by virtue of the inserted headers themselves. I think that increased quoting merely creates a glancible means of discerning author switches, but does so at the expense of appearance (and the ability to easily separate individual voices, especially if the email is later printed).

As far as the current functionality of MailMate goes, I find it cumbersome to Select All and apply decreased quoting for every email reply (I like being consistent to my recipients).

Thank you for your response.

I'm ready to ditch Mailmate because of this one annoying 'feature'. Really need this to be implemented.

Me too. Really annoying.

Charles, Chris and Henry,

This seems to be an interesting change in desired email behavior.
What email systems are the complainants using? How did they become used to non-standard quote-handling?
Are the complainants in a particular occupation? Are they all of similar technical education? Are they of similar age?

I'm very curious to see what is driving a preference for unindented quoting.

Thanks.

I have 20 years in software development at the enterprise level, Master's degree in Distributed Systems. I have NEVER used quoting. The reason being COPY/PASTE becomes a nightmare. Generally there will be, at some point, the need to copy someone's content. This content is for consumption in other systems; ticketing, another new email, ERP, HR, etc. And don't give me any crap about designing crappy systems that shouldn't use email as the input!

Thanks, Chris, that makes sense.

My clients are all using MS Outlook in an enterprise setting. Note that Outlook does not behave this way by default but as you can expect, this app is widely used in corporate settings.

Charles, I get a fair amount of Outlook mail from clients, and it does the indenting, which, yes can be a big mess after a few trips. Do you think that IT managers are turning the feature on because it's an old habit rather than because it's useful?