[Nottingham] Farewell (email and posting)

[Joshua Lock]

On 4 June 2010 11:23, Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk> wrote:
> 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?

No.

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

They are "imposing" this not to follow business practice, but to make
it easier to reply to emails with your dinky keyboard, which is even
more painful if it's on-screen.

I believe this is the right design decision too! And I'm a fastidious
in-line commenter and mail trimmer when I'm using a full email UI.

>
> 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.

Get a better mail client, one that can collapse quotes. Do any desktop
clients do this? That would be awesome!
/me goes to file a bug report...

>
> 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.

Get a better phone ;-) Or at least mail client...

>
> 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?

No, I think they are still useful they will just be marginally more
difficult to navigate. I can live with that!
It's entirely possible that archive viewing interfaces could collapse
quoted text much as GMail does!

>
> 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!)

Good idea at the time, BAD BAD BAD NAUGHTY idea now. You'd be
explicitly *excluding* people from taking part if they use one of a
growing set of mail clients.

-- 
Joshua Lock