Interesting suggestions about quoting and posting

[Lorenzo Taylor]

Usually I choose not to quote whenever possible, but instead make my answer 
clear enough that the question is very easily deducible from the reply, usually 
by paraphrasing or restating the question in the reply, kinda the same way I 
have been doing in my Esperanto correspondence courses. Example:

What is the family name of Ana?
The family name of Ana is Pana.

However, I just had a message to which I was responding which I preferred to 
respond to in a q&a style approach. Unfortunately, since I pasted each portion 
of the message text I wanted to quote, no attribution was present, so I had to 
make up my own by looking up the person's name in the previous message and typing:

According to Somebody:

above the first occurrence of quoted text.

I am running Thunderbird 3.0 and have quoting turned off by default. What is the 
best way to do this without having to turn quoting on for every message I send? 
I can easily enough take out all the extra information that usually looks like:

On Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Somebody <somebody at somedomain.com> wrote:

And replace it with something very simple like:

According to Somebody:

or

Somebody said:

But how to get an attribution of any kind at the top of a message where I am 
only pasting a select portion of quoted text and don't want the entire message 
quoted for me to then have to go back and delete the irrelevant parts? I would 
much rather just paste in the relevant parts instead, probably the reverse of 
what most people do, but somehow easier for me.

Thanks,
Lorenzo
-- 
Nia diligenta kolegaro
En laboro paca ne laciĝos,
Ĝis la bela sonĝo de l' homaro
Por eterna ben' efektiviĝos.
--La Espero, himno de Esperanto