Can I be honest about something? I have never understood how impossibly passionate some tech folks get about this. John Gruber, for instance.

I mean, what is the real harm of hitting reply, typing a response, and hitting send without cutting out all or most of the message trail before? I sincerely doubt the sum total of all top-posters makes even the tiniest dent in global bandwidth. This isn't the early '90s on 14k modems. Yet people get ENRAGED over it!

It's more about an irritation with careless email senders. I find it irritating to get a response that says "Mark covered this earlier" or "Can we do this?" with a nested thread of emails below. Remove quote by default and these people are forced to add the relevant details and save everyone some time.

I think there is also a point to be made about the visual noise it creates. Although Thunderbird's QuoteCollapse add-on is awesome because I never see all the nested replies.

Part of me recognizes that broken email programs like Outlook couldn't generate correct In-Reply-To or References headers so quoting every message prior was the easiest way to follow a discussion.

No no, the one-virus-at-a-time thing is MY JOB and you know it.

I wanted to tell you - I'm going to be an author on a research paper! Will have more details once it's submitted.

I also think so...