Tom's opinion: Top posting is like a meeting where one person talks,
everybody hears it, and the conversation continues without having to
explain the whole meeting each time. When someone new comes along
though, it would be nice to have a chronological history of what
happened before - that's bottom posting. And that includes archiving
when the "someone new" might be reading the conversation years later.
I like top posting because most of my work is real-time conversations.
If someone really wants bottom posting to catch up or for whatever
reason, then it doesn't seem too hard for them to make a script or find
a program to reverse the order of the conversation locally. I do that
manually every once in a while when someone at work says, "Tom, can you
go through this month-long email thread and try to help?" Ouch. So the
first thing I do is start with a notepad window open and make notes from
the bottom up, not only reversing the email string, but also trying to
weed out only what I really need to better understand the issue.
Now I sometimes do a combination like Curtis just did, where I'll
include portions of the original email and make comments underneath each
portion. I'll usually do that by top posting with a copy/paste of just
the part I'm referencing. I rarely do the "See my response in
red/green/blue below" intermixed in the entire original email. When
people do that to me, I often have trouble finding that one little red
word somewhere in the pile.
On 6/13/2020 10:21 AM, Charles Mills wrote:
What is it with tech bulletin boards and the fuss about top-posting? I will bet I have
gotten tens of thousands of business e-mail replies in my life and every single one of
them was "top-posted."
What is it about tech bulletin boards where folks seem to want the most
relevant stuff -- the new stuff -- at the BOTTOM???
I *like* Outlook.
Charles
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2020 9:54 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Quote style (was: ... Passive FTP ... )
On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:17:11 +0000, Jackson, Rob wrote:
My cruddy email application (Outlook) doesn't do the >-style quoting (or at
least I don't know how to make it), so let me try below with tabs; it will
probably be ugly.
Does First Horizon require you to use Outlook? I mostly post from the
LISTSERV Web interface.
Does it enforce top-posting? Does it prohibit editing quoted text, heaps
of legal disclaimers and all?
First Horizon Bank
Mainframe Technical Support
-- gil
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