These instructions apply when reading messages on the group site. If you receive the Group messages in your private mailbox, it will be a similar process, but undoubtedly there will be differences.

Hitting REPLY brings up a new page, which will contain the full text of the message you are replying to. At the top of the page there is a "TO:" box. By default, it is set to respond to the group as a whole. Typically, you won't ever change this, however, by clicking on the "To:" box menu arrow, you can direct your response to the message author only, or to the Groupowner.

Next, it will show your name and email address, and after that, the date. These are set. The next box is the subject line. Normally you would leave this alone, but it can be edited if you would like to change it, or add to it, perhaps if you are responding to a specific person, but want the whole group to benefit from your message, you might just add that persons name to the subject line. This is just an example. Typically, you'd leave the subject line alone, so it will keep the full thread intact.

Then comes the body. This shows topmost, the author of the message you are responding to. E.g.

--- In kienbock@yahoogroups.com, "kmgtd" wrote:

This is followed by the message, or what the author had written. You will notice on the left side of the message, that every line has a " >" before it. These are quote markers. They tell you that the following text is being quoted from the original message.

In the simplest type of response, you would just delete everything in the BODY and simply write your response. You can delete the text a few different ways. You line your cursor up at the end of the text you want to delete and just hit Backspace to eliminate as much as you want. The easiest way is to highlight the unwanted text, and after highlighting, hit BACKSPACE.

In order to highlight text, line your cursor up either at the beginning, or at the end of the text you wish to eliminate. Press down your left mouse button and hold. While holding the left button down, move your mouse across the text you wish to highlight. You will notice the text being enveloped in a colored box as you do. When you have highlighted the desired text, let go of the left mouse button. The text should remain highlighted. At this point you can hit BACKSPACE, which will delete the text.

Another possibility, once the text is highlighted, is to click your right mouse button, which will bring up a menu with several options, one of which is DELETE. The others are CUT, COPY, and PASTE.

DELETE - Will delete all the highlighted text.

CUT - Will delete all the highlighted text, but will COPY it to your CLIPBOARD, where you can later PASTE it into the message, or any other document. Your CLIPBOARD is essentially a place in your computers memory where information, in this case text, is stored. If you use the CUT, and\or COPY command, it will overwrite the contents of the CLIPBOARD with the new text you are copying. If you shut your computer off, the contents of the CLIPBOARD will be flushed out and erased.

COPY - This command will copy the highlighted text to the CLIPBOARD, but unlike CUT, it leaves the highlighted text intact.

PASTE - This command is used for inserting the CLIPBOARD contents into a document. It is generally used in conjunction with the CUT, or the COPY commands.

If you would like to respond to a particular part of the message, highlight all the text EXCEPT the part you would like to respond to, and then delete it. This will leave you with the quote to which you are responding. This quote may have a > at the beginning to indicate it is quoted from the original message. To make things easier to read, and to clarify that this is the quote, I like to insert double quote markers at the beginning and end. You do this by simply typing in >> at the beginning of the quote, and << at the end of the quote.

After quoting the part of the message you are responding to, simply start a new line underneath it, and type your reply. The best way for you to learn this and feel comfortable doing it is to play around with it. You won't affect anything until you hit SEND.

By repeating this process for each part of the message you are responding to, you can respond to different comments or questions from the message. It would then look something like this:

>>Quoted material<<

Your response

>>Quoted material<<

Your response

>>Quoted material<<

Your response, etc.

I like to leave a line in between the quoted material and the response, as well as breaking up my response\message into smaller paragraphs. This serves two purposes. It looks better and makes it much easier to read, and when people respond to your message, the smaller paragraphs make it much easier to pick and choose the parts they would like to respond to.

You will notice that sometimes when you respond to a message, the formatting of the original message is often spoiled. This is a Yahoo thing, but I find it incredibly annoying, so I will spend an extra minute trying to clean up the mess so the overall message just looks more presentable. This isn't necessary, but it just looks better and is more pleasant to read. The other thing that everyone should be doing, is deleting all the text that isn't essential to your response. This keeps things nice and neat, but also saves space and bandwidth on the server.

Once you are satisfied with your response, and the overall look and formatting of the post, click the SEND icon, either at the top, or at the bottom of the text box. This will send the response to the recipient, which is generally the Group. If you need further help, feel free to ask. As I said, the best way to learn is to play around with it. Even if you make a total mess of it, you can simply close the window and then start anew.