[H-GEN] Email Ettiquite; a Sardonic Reminder.

Bruce Campbell bc at humbug.org.au
Sun Sep 10 04:33:54 EDT 2006


Most guides on email ettiquite focus on two important aspects.  The first 
aspect, which is the bane of all thinking persons, is emphasing the evils 
of top-posting.  This can be summed up as:

 	A: It is converse to the normal left-to-right, top-to-bottom
 	   reading order.

 	Q: Why are people so against top-posting?

The second aspect guides to email ettiquite focus on is quoting only the 
bits that are relevant to your reply.  It is quite tiring to plough 
through a thread and read the same bits of text over, and > over,
and >> over, and >>> over again, to say nothing of the annoyance factor, 
>>>> again.

Both of these aspects are incorporated in guides in an effort to ensure 
that people have fully read, and more importantly, understood, both the 
original mail and their own reply.  This has benefits, in that a little 
bit of effort in writing the post can encourage people to actually read
your post.  A bit like the section of bricked text you are now reading.

Now, let us examine a recent thread on this very mailing list.  The posts 
generally opened with:

   On this day, May Nostrum wrote:
   > [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
   > [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
   > On a different day, Jimmy Kibitz wrote:
   >> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
   >> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
   >> Way back when, May Nostrum wrote:
   >>> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
   >>> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

( and so forth ).

Expanded out, that section of quoted text takes up slightly more than a 
full screen (at 24x80).  Rather than seeing the start of their hopefully 
well-constructed arguments with a little bit of reminder text above it, I 
need to wade through reams of abnormally-quoted text to get to the gist of 
their post.  I have no need, or desire, to read the list's reminder text
aaannnooottthhheeerrr ttthhhrrreee tttiiimmmeeesss...

Thus, simply because neither of the two participants in the thread have 
bothered to put any effort into their replies, I see no reason to put any 
effort into reading their arguments.  Without seeing any of their words, I 
am biased against them.  They're probably just windoze weenies anyway who 
had someone tweak their mail program to simply put the cursor at the 
bottom, and their replies are based solely on a single sentence that 
caught their fancy during their reading.  'Next' is far easier... oooh, 
thats the latest issue of 'The Adventures of Semicolon; The Dividing Line 
Between Crime and Justice'.  Far more interesting reading.

So, if you've managed to read this far, congratulations.  If you've worked 
out whether this diatribe applies to you, bully for you.  Theres an email 
equitte guide linked from the HUMBUG web page for further reading, 
grokking and following:  http://www.humbug.org.au/netiquette.php .  Enjoy!

-- 
   Bruce.







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