Have you every received an email from someone that looks like the one on the right? Of course you have.  We all have. Ever wonder how all that junk accumulated and made the email a pain to wade through and actually read?  It's simple.  Really.

It's called "Quoted Text" or "Include In Reply".  It occurs when you click on Reply or Forward in processing your email.  It's a very important and helpful feature in maintaining continuity during an email discussion with others. Unmanaged, this option can easily create a mess.  Don't despair!  It's easy to clean up and you'll look like a creative genius when you forward email to others.   Here's how to do it:

What many folks don't know that while you are in a FORWARD window, you are also in a complete EDIT mode as well.  This means you may quickly select text and/or images then Delete, Copy or Cut what you have SELECTed.  (Figure 2 and 3)

Continue the process of selecting and deleting until all the extraneous material has been removed.

Since you are in a full editing mode, you may insert any text and/or images you would like to include and Voila! It's clean and ready to send.  See?  Easy, huh?  Well, easy so far but there may be some rough road ahead.  Don't worry about this little technological speedbump though.  You are "greater than" the problem.

You'll recall earlier we referred to "Quoted Text" which is the text and/or images which are included in a forwarded email.  The software engineers who designed many of the currently used email clients elected, in some instances, to use the mathematical symbol > (greater than) to mark the text which is being forwarded. That in itself is not that annoying but added to the problem is a little noticed option which tells the program to "Reply to messages using the format in which they were sent". The result can be (and usually is) multiple symbols that often look like this:  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  (Yuk!)