[H-GEN] So I was thinking

[ben.carlyle at invensys.com]

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G'day,

Whether it's courteous or not may depend on the amount of snipping you do 
to the message you're quoting. While adding all new text at the top 
appears to have become a defacto-standard in the corporate world it's 
certainly not the traditional means. I do this because my crappy[1] mail 
reader here at work makes in extremely difficult to quote properly. 
Actually, I've gotten used to it. For short replys to short questions it 
seems to work quite well. Often the subject-line tells the reader enough 
about the thread to understand a post without reference to other posts[2], 
and when a little extra context is needed the quoted text is only a 
page-down away.

It doesn't suit every purpose, though. For longer replies more context 
tends to be needed. For these kinds of replies I believe in-line posting 
with sensible quote-marks makes it easier to understand the information as 
posted. Often mail-readers that are based around the concept of placing 
quoted text at the end don't insert correct quote marks at all [see 1] 
making it more difficult than it already is to alternate between the two 
styles through a thread. When list members aren't following the vein of 
every new thread being posted the context is often a important as the post 
it's self so particularly on USENET-style lists/groups top-quoting fails 
almost to the pont of being silly. Also I've found that I've often written 
my reply at the top and completely forgotten about trimming my quoted 
text. This is the kind of thing that can get you shot :)

While placing quoted text at the bottom of a new post may be better in 
some respects for personal email, email sent to lists is really a 
different beast. This form of quoting fails to perform it's function in 
many respects in the list environment.

Benjamin.

[1] Lotus *f...n* notes.
[2] Assuming that they've been keeping up with the thread, and that the 
subject-line in any way reflects the message content.





Annerley Al <alex at lets.org.au>
Sent by: Majordomo <majordom at caliburn.humbug.org.au>
25/09/02 08:47
Please respond to general

 
        To:     general at lists.humbug.org.au
        cc: 
        Subject:        Re: [H-GEN] So I was thinking
Yo. Could you clarify top-posting please? I believe that it is better to 
reply to messages at the top, so that you don't have to scroll down 
through 
stuff you probably don't need to read again before seeing the reply. If 
you 
do need to refresh your memory on what has gone before, you can do so by 
scrolling down if you need to.

To me this is obviously the most courteous way to reply to a message, but 
I 
see some would not agree. So, can people please explain why it can be 
considered desirable to add comments to the bottom of a previous posting?
Yassou!

At 01:40 PM 24/09/2002 -0400, Jason wrote:

>Wouldn't it be fun to tweak SpamAssassin to killfile or mark
>badly-formed list messages?  You know, stuff like top-posting, icky
>user agents, test messages, HTML or quoted-printable messages, overly
>long signatures, and so on.



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