Q: What's the most annoying thing in an e-mail? A: On Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at 3:27:49 PM, Somebody Nu <someb...@somewhere.nu> wrote: > On Monday, June 11, 2012 at 7:28:46 AM, Yesterdays Child <remem...@iwrote.it> > wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: Remember Me <ple...@dontforget.me> > > Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2012 at 11:37:15 PM > > > This is the original question I asked on this list. And this is its > > > fourth showing. > > This is a response I gave, and I really hope it gets a third look. > I also responded to the original post, and I bet somebody's even going to > leave the signatures and list footers in the message before posting a helpful > one-line response all the way down at the bottom. > > -- > here is a really cool signature that I hope everyone reads again and again. > Lovely. I gave my signature a second line. Wait, there's a third line with a > http://link.to.my.informative.blog.com > > -- > List Footer Mailing List > http://www.mailinglists.com/mailman/listinfo/listfooter.html > To unsubscribe, go to > http://www.mailinglists.com/mailman/listinfo/listfooter-unsubscribe.html > or send a blank e-mail to listfooter-requ...@mailinglists.com with > "unsubscribe" in the subject. Now here comes my rather enlightening remark, finaly. Hey, I made you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this one. I hope you are reading this on a mobile phone. Aren't I a good bottom poster? Q: Why is this a bad thing? A: People read e-mail many different ways on many different devices. The mobile phone is one example of a commonly used device for reading e-mail these days. Although people seem to enjoy staring at that little screen all day long for everything in the world, those teeny tiny screens are much harder to read than even the blurry fuzzy green screens from the past. Unfortunately, until I can get my computer working again, I am using my mobile phone exclusively for reading my e-mail, and worse still, my phone uses speech, because I also happen to be visually impaired. I don't really have the time to scroll down one line at a time, and most other people don't really have the time to scroll down 5 lines at a time wading through tons upon tons of wrotes, original messages, times and dates, angle brackets and messages we have already read as many as 10 times or more to get to the likely helpful answer all the way at the bottom of all that quoting. Likewise, all that quoting at the bottom of a helpful response is also rather bad, but it is certainly easier to ignore unless there is a specific reference to a potentially forgotten part of the quoted message.
As a general rule, top posting and bottom posting should both be avoided. Whenever I post a response to a message, I *only* quote if I feel that there is something to be gained from reading the exact words of the OP again, usually to answer specific questions in a sort of Q/A format or to respond to specific points in a message one point at a time. Otherwise, I completely turn off quoting and state my response in such a way that no one has to read the original post over again in an attempt to figure out what in the world I'm talking about. This usually saves a lot of people a lot of headaches and a lot of time in the end. The reader will note that aside from the bogus quoting near the top of this message, I have not felt the need to include any real quoting in this message, but most people will certainly be able to deduce the context, even though this message is a response to the whole top vs bottom posting fireworks rather than the original post regarding DNS servers. ~Kyle -- Kyle is a droid. The whole world knows it. This e-mail shows it.
