[sclug] TopPosting Was: Helping others into FOSS/Linux

[Damion Yates]

On Tue, 3 May 2005, Alan Pope wrote:

> On 03/05/05, Hamlesh Motah <admin at hamlesh.com> wrote:
>
> > Both Neil's and your views expressed how I felt when I was asked
> > not to top post (once I read what it was).  I must not be
> > understanding, if its such a bad practise why hasn't it formed a
> > greater more weightier part of the business community email
> > etiquette, whom to be fair are starting to use email more than the
> > average geeks.
>
> One simple reason. Microsoft. Your average desktop user has one
> email client and thats Microsoft Outhouse. Either that or Lotus
> Notes. The default in both of those apps is to top post.

Unfortunately this is also the case, for a great many email clients
these days, including pine, kmail, evolution, most of the mozilla
project ones and almost all commonly used modern windows email
clients.

On the plus side these are normally configured to make in-line posting
easy, the only top-posting thing is where the cursor is left.  From
what I recall of seeing Outlook in use, it's actually very difficult
to make a reply look like a normal email client reply, without the
help of outlook-quotefix.  You also need some registry edits to force
replies and viewing to be in plaintext - you'd be surprised how hard
it tries to force you to send rtf and html emails, especially if
you're replying to one, even if all your settings are asking for plain
text via the gui config.

When replying in these clients they also indent the previous text to
the right slightly, usually with ">", but you can use other
charactors.

They also often colour highlight intented text, often with variations
of colour for further indents (replies to replies).  In many there is
also recognition of signatures if placed after a Usenet style
delimiter /^-- $/ (this is regexp format, but basically, at the start
of the line you have two dashes and a space before the newline).

Some clients, I believe pegasus for windows and pine for the console
look out for "-- " and will omit it in a reply, as it's clearly not
needed, this allows you to avoid having to trim as much.

Some clients won't let you just reply with just a line or so of text
with no trimming, such as "me too" at the bottom (or top) of an
existing email you're replying to.  This was added in to AOL's
software after years of issues with AOL users annoying the rest of the
Internet, in the early 90s

All of these features, the highlighting and dealing with signatures,
some vetting of "me too" are about the only sort of official
acknowledgement I know of.  Companies who have made email clients have
acknowledged the general Internet netiquette and incorporated these
features in to their clients.

There are a number of websites about top-posting, and zillions of
usenet/mailinglist threads about it online.  Most are a complete
rant-fest.  Some of the websites look truely awful hardly official at
all.  In fact a couple of years back while trying to explain the
concept to the email standards group in the BBC my google searches
could only find readable sensible official looking webpages that
promoted top-posting as the correct way to do things!  With in-line
posting sites were all using blick and red on black large font crap.

A quick google now shows that things have turned around, which is
surprising considering that everyone replied at the bottom or in-line
10+ years ago, and it basically only went downhill when MS got their
computers online.

> IMO people who top-post and people who advocate top-posting are just
> lazy arrogant and inconsiderate, pure and simple. There, I said it.
> :)

It's this comment that probably caused the massive and verbose thread
that followed!  I honestly believe that the VAST majority of people
who top-post, do so out of a complete lack of awareness of any other
way.  In fact I know and have converted 100s of people I work with and
email over the years, all they needed was for me to explain what I
meant by "you're top posting".

It's quite easy for most people to see the benefits, I know of very
few people who advocate top-posting.  More common are people who know
they probably shouldn't but their client makes it hard, or people who
know they are emailing people who wouldn't understand why their text
is at the top of the email they are sent back, then sometimes the odd
lazy person.

Those who believe it's inevitable that top-posting will become the
standard and who agree that it's easier for people to cope with, drive
me crazy.  Have you ever actually tried explaining the situation to
people who top-post?  Lack of knowledge of what is out there, is part
of the reason MS rules the desktop world, not because it's a good
desktop OS.  The fight is definitely worth keeping with, just don't
treat it as a fight - just show people the light, not say what they
are doing is wrong in nasty tones.

Emails to a technical forum such as this should almost certainly not
be top-posted, the BBC's technical forum lists are mostly
reply-in-line biased thanks to the likes of me.  The 30K staff who all
went on BBC Trainings course on how to use Outlook and top-post are
going to be a greater struggle, but I have several 100 people who are
now fixed :)


Of interest to some might be some stats I produced a while back (about
2003) on email clients used by the public voting by replying to an
email we sent out via their http request on the BBC website.

39% webbased - hotmail etc.
32% misc - pine/mutt/kmail/pegasus/mailtool/eudora etc
29% MS - Outlook+Outlook-Mac+Outlook Express etc

The misc was truly random, no client making >1%  -  But the really
interesting statistic that I liked, was that unlike the browser war,
MS were _definitely_ not in control of the email market.  Despite
company after company switching to Exchange+Outlook, less than 30% of
email traffic to the BBC was from Outlook.  So all of the managers
who'd argued that "I would like to recall that message" emails worked
for everyone except my weird "pine" client wer talking crap.

Thanks,

Damion

-- 
Damion Yates - email: Damion.Yates at bbc.co.uk - phone: +44 (0) 1628 407759