[HLUG] Email Formatting - a bit of a rant...

[Richard Smedley]

On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 00:43 +0100, george @hotmail.com wrote:
> bu isnt top posting sometimes a good idea,

Yes, but rarely, and not in this instance.

In business, the convention of top-posting to an un-snipped
thread is used to enable people joining an expanding conversation
to join in while those included from the beginning read only the 
new lines at the top.

The culture of mailing lists, far older, and derived from
USENET, is for conversations read in different ways.

> so you/we dont have to read all the conversation again
> as we've already read it?

All unnecessary bits of the previous e-mail should be snipped,
leaving only the bits of previous post(s) necessary for
understanding the flow of conversation.

Top-posting and bottom-posting are both inapropriate
for mailing lists most of the time. In-line posting
enables a conversational style, which can
unambiguously address all points in a previous mail.

The placing of the cursor at the top of the new mail,
so derided in Microsoft's Outlook MUA, is actually
an aid to good editing and inline posting. :^)

Take, too, the special case of those receiving
the list by daily digest. They have to scroll through
pages of unsnipped repeats of previous mails to get
to the next poster. I've stopped reading half a dozen
lists [1] by digest, as 90% of the content is unsnipped
quotes.

> specially if theyre on a little mobile phone thingy scanning thr emails?

People paying by the byte for downloads are particularly 
grateful for snipping.

I'm not sure  how they feel about those of us who
send long, off-topic emails on posting styles, so
I'll shut up now ;o)

 - Richard

[1] Not LUGs of course ;)

-- 
Richard Smedley,                                         rs at m6-it.org
Technical Director,                                     www.M6-IT.org
M6-IT CIC                                        +44 (0)779 456 07 14

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