Quoting double in replies

[Victor Dewsbery]

When I reply to messages, I like to quote the full message (and manually delete anything that I want to leave out). And I usually want to prefix the quoted lines with the > symbol.

However, I often find that the message that I am replying to is quoted double, so I have to manually find the place where the repetition starts and delete from there.

In an earlier thread, I was advised not to tick the box Options>Advanced>Do not quote sigdash-formatted signatures. That was because I want signatures included in what I quote, and I had observed that they were often missing.

I wonder if this is the reason for my double quoting problem - and what can be done to retain the signatures but avoid the double quoting.

[Tomas]

If I understood it well, it's the double quoting as when the already quoted message, gets quoted on reply, thus the double-quote.
For example as this snippet:

Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> > Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > > Do you like top-posting?
> > No.
> How come?

(copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style)

[Victor Dewsbery]

If I understood it well, it's the double quoting as when the already quoted message, gets quoted on reply, thus the double-quote.
For example as this snippet:

Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> > Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > > Do you like top-posting?
> > No.
> How come?

No, that is not the point I am trying to describe. What I see is:

Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> > Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > > Do you like top-posting?
> > No.
> How come?

Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > Do you like top-posting?
> No.
How come?

What I see is that the whole of the text is quoted twice, once with an arrow symbol > in front of it and once without.
I have no problem with the > characters, nor with > > or > > > (nor even with > > > > > > etc. )
My problem is not the accumulation of quote marks, it is the fact that the whole of the text is duplicated, i.e. quoted twice.
By "double quoting" I mean that the text itself is doubled, so the message is almost twice as long as it should be.

An example of this was the mail I sent to support today (which is so long because the previous correspondence is quoted first of all in full length with a > added in front of each line, then again in its full length without the initial > character).

[Tomas]

Thanks for the patience with explaining it, I was heading in a completely wrong direction.

the culprit is the %qbody% tag in Automatic Headers/Reply, when at the same time "Quote text when replying" is enabled as well.