On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 01:37:36PM -0500, Peter Davis wrote: > On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 01:10:37PM -0500, Patrick Shanahan wrote: > > > > Ignorant, disrespectful and inconsiderate is the top poster who quotes > > 5000 lines including sigs and trailers and irrelevant/unenforcable > > disclaimers *and* the bottom poster who does the same and adds a single > > line (or more) of comment which probably ends up being a "me 2" or not > > even pertaining to the subject. > > Your preferences don't apply everywhere. In most of the (many) places > I've worked, top-posting is the normal, and preferred practice.
This is, IMNSHO, an evolution of the fact that most people in business use MS Outlook, which is complete and utter crap, combined with the fact that most people are lazy and inconsiderate (I would actually say "oblivious" which is almost, but not quite as bad). They never learned the right way to deal with mail, in large part because they use Outlook, and various versions of Outlook either did not handle threads, or have it turned off by default; but also in part because they are lazy and inconsiderate, and as a result value their own time far ahead of that of their many recipients. There are two cases that matter with regard to this issue: - The intended recipients were on the thread from the start. In this case, your communication is VASTLY most effective, BY FAR more efficient for recipients, and sometimes also more efficient EVEN FOR THE AUTHOR, to reply in line, trimming the bits of the thread that are not relevant to your reply. Your recipients may be many, so any inefficiencies here are multiplied by that number. In contrast, the work you need to do to trim your e-mail affects only you. The reason it can be more efficient for the author is that often, in order to get your point across without being ambiguous, you end up writing more to explain what you meant, when if you had responded in line, possibly a one-word answer would have sufficed. - New recipients have been added who were not on the original thread This is the most common excuse that most people who favor top posting give: If people weren't on the thread, they can't get the full context without having the whole thread. And the concern is valid, but the fact is that it's very rarely useful for a recipient to read the whole thread that came before. Not only that, but it's very inconsiderate to expect a new recipient to have to wade through, IN REVERSE ORDER, every single post that came before in a thread. The right thing to do is for the author to breifly summarize the key points of the thread, and then add their own comments to the most recent reply in-line. The reason doing this is unpopular is because it means the author will have to spend a few extra minutes drafting their reply. Poor you. Top posting is inefficient, generally ill-concieved, and just plain rude. > That way, you can quickly see what someone has added to the > conversation without wading through quoted material. If only that were actually true. My absolute favorite is when someone replies to a 5-paragraph e-mail that, say, offers 3 different perspectives on a topic, and top-posts, "Yeah, I agree." Really? Which of the 3 major perspectives, or numerous individual points do you agree with? It's totally useless, completely ineffective communication... but very common. Top posting almost invariably requires me to re-read WAY more of the previous thread than I would have had to if the user posted in line and trimmed quoted text appropriately. And on top of that, you have to read, in chunks, BACKWARD. You call that efficient? > Similarly, quoting the entire thread is preferred, so you can refer > back to earlier parts of the discussion without having to dig up older > messages. That's only possibly true if you use a crap client that doesn't thread, and you clean up your e-mail too often, AND you have the attention span of a gnat. Cuz otherwise, there's no digging up old e-mails... you have them right there. You need only glance at them to recover enough context to figure out which is the right one to look at, and find the salient details. Or, if you absolutely have to, you *can* re-read the whole thread. That's not any different than re-reading the text included on a fully-quoted top-posted e-mail thread, EXCEPT that a) the conversation isn't backwards, and b) those that don't have the attention span of a gnat don't need to wade through everything to get at what you're replying to. If you quote only the relevant bits, it will be immediately obvious, and they'll likely remember enough of the preceeding conversation that they don't need to review it. > Certainly sigs serve no purpose here, but it's too much work > to find and excise them all. Nonsense. First off, every e-mail client should remove them automatically when you reply. Doing that is simple (even Mutt does not currently do it AFAIK, but it can be done easily in a variety of ways with facilities mutt provides). But even though that is not the case, no e-mail author should ever need to remove more than ONE: the one that came from the author of the precise e-mail to which you are replying. Doing that is easy, I do it manually with every e-mail I reply to... as part of the trimming that I already do with every single message I reply to. The amount of time it takes to do that, over and above the rest of the trimming, is negligible. The total time it takes to trim per e-mail, I would estimate to be on the order of about 5 seconds or less, on average. > Most workplaces are using email to communicate, and they want maximum > efficiency in that. Then, if they're top posting, they're doing it wrong. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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