[Nottingham] Farewell (email and posting)

[Martin]

On 04/06/10 10:51, Graeme Fowler wrote:
> A once useful list, descended into the depths of hair splitting. Shame,
> really.
> 
> Bye - have fun with the continuing arguments over top and bottom
> posting!

And here we have a little fun and lively debate over something that most
people take for granted or don't even notice.


As I suspected, at least some of the "smart phone" devices are imposing
how you reply to email whether you like it or not. No surprise that the
'default' is to follow the 'business' practice of forever top posting
and to append an ever-growing tail of previous emails from the thread.

That means that a thread grows *exponentially* in storage!


Is gmail (or other webmail) doing the same?

And is that what people actually want? Or is it a default because noone
cares?

Does it matter?


For my part, for normal use, it doesn't matter.

There is *human* time wasted if you're trying to follow an archived
thread and you must scroll down pages of quoted previous emails to get
to the bottom to then move onto the next thread message.

The KILLER is when I'm 'on the road' on my admittedly rather old mobile
device and I'm charged a fortune by the byte for downloading mail that
is many times longer than it need be.

html emails still have a plain text copy attached for email clients that
might not know about html. In the example that sparked the postings
thread, that was useful being as the MIME headers were corrupt and not
picked up... html email code looks ugly!


I thought we all on the list had a high sense of freedom of choice.

Hence the interest in the old top-bottom posting question?


The 'new bit' here is what mobile devices are forcing people to do, and
of what old ways are being killed off.


Do we abandon the mail archives and digests as being of no use?

For me, the mail archives are occasionally invaluable to tap in to the
past real world wisdom from others.


There is a setting for posting that requires a new post to contain more
new text than quoted previous text. That was commonly imposed for the
old Usenet postings. Good idea or bad? (Stay calm, I'm not changing any
settings to this maillist!)


Farewell to choice?

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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