And FWIW, I add my voice to those who prefer to read replies
underneath the original text. Even if Mark were the only person vocal
enough to complain, you can still rest assured that there are many
more who agree. You've now heard from quite a few regular posters;
there are probably several *hundred* lurkers who feel the same way,
but do not post (possibly because they cannot). Also, these mails get
archived all over the internet, so a generation not yet born can read
and be either enlightened or irritated, as the case may be.

If the above paragraph doesn't make sense to you, see it interleaved
below for enlightenment. ;)

Am 17.08.2012 07:19, schrieb Dennis Lee Bieber:

I tend to disagree with the bandwidth argument, which is obsolete. To
me, it's more about communication efficiency and it's only one possible
way to achieve that.

Just mentioning that there are cultures other than this one.

Nevertheless, I've taken up writing at the top of emails

"My replies are interleaved with your questions which are shown starting
with > symbols."

to make it obvious that they should keep reading.

It *is* possible to top-post and communicate effectively, it just takes a
LOT more work, and the sorts of people who prefer top posting simply
don't do it. Top-posting only works for shallow communication: simple
questions, simple replies, and shallow threads, two or three replies at
most. It's good for emails like:

    Subject: Meet you at the pub on Friday afternoon?

    See u there!!!

On 17 August 2012 21:43, Steven D'Aprano

If you don't care whether your messages are read, continue to top-post.

If you want to show that you've made efforts to make your message more
readable, use interleaved replies and trim off material to which you're
not replying <URL:http://brooksreview.net/2011/01/interleaved-email/>.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one
persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends
on the unreasonable man."

and then decide exactly how (un)reasonable to be in a given context.

[No claims to always succeed in these calibrations :-) ]
And which brings me back to the question of how best to tell new folk
about the netiquette around here.

I was once teaching C to a batch of first year students.  I was
younger then and being more passionate and less reasonable, I made a
rule that students should indent their programs correctly.
[Nothing like python in sight those days!]

A few days later there was a commotion.  Students appeared in class
with black-badges, complained to the head-of-department and what not.
Very perplexed I said: "Why?! I allowed you to indent in any which way
you like as long as you have some rules and follow them." I imagined
that I had been perfectly reasonable and lenient!

Only later did I realize that students did not understand
- how to indent
- why to indent
- what program structure meant

So when people top-post it seems reasonable to assume that they dont
know better before jumping to conclusions of carelessness, rudeness,
inattention etc.

For example, my sister recently saw some of my mails and was mystified
that I had sent back 'blank mails' until I explained and pointed out
that my answers were interleaved into what was originally sent!
Clearly she had only ever seen (and therefore expected) top-posted
mail-threads.  Like your 'corporate-emailer' she found it damn neat,
after the initiation.

As in, "Gosh, dearest brother has sent me an email without saying
anything. That's weird. I hope he's alright? Maybe there's something a
bit further down? Or a funny picture of a cat at the end? Or something? I
better scroll down a bit further and see."

I'm not talking about "complicated tech stuff" like View > Message Source
and trying to determine whether perhaps the MIME type is broken and
there's an invisible attachment. I'm talking about almost the simplest
thing in the friggin' world, *scrolling down and looking at what's there*.
The software equivalent of somebody handing you a "blank" piece of paper
and turning it around to see if maybe there's something on the back.

Because that's what I do, and I don't think I'm some sort of hyper-
evolved mega-genius with a brain the size of a planet, I'm just some guy.
Nobody needed to tell me "Hey dummy, the text you are looking for is a
bit further down, keep reading." I just looked on my own, and saw the
text on my own, and actually read it without being told to, and a little
light bulb went on over my head and I went "Wow! People can actually
write stuff in between other stuff! How did they do that?"

Now sure, I make allowances for 70 year olds who have never touched a
computer before and have to ask "What's a scroll bar?" and "How do I use
this mousey-pointer thing?" I assume your sister has minimal skills like
"can scroll" and "knows how to read".

I'm not sure which is worse -- that perhaps I *am* some sort of mega-
genius and keep overestimating the difficulty of scroll-down-and-read for
normal people, or that others have such short attention spans that
anything that they can't see immediately in front of them might as well
not exist. Either thought is rather depressing.

I've learned a ton from reading your posts - so much so that I think my
brain is getting heavier[1].

Thank you and cheers!
Malcolm

The first we're all familiar with.

Furry children?

Of course Steven is a bit egotistical. That sort of happens when
you're better than 95% of the human population of this planet.

--
Cheers.

Top posting makes more sense in a corporate setting for a couple reasons.
Seeing the exact email trail rather than what someone considers "relevant"
context can be very useful. Not to mention that frequently corporate email
is more like slow instant messaging; I need less context (e.g.
conversation  history) and get all the information I need from what the
sender is writing.

I find inline (and to a lesser extent bottom) posting to be a mixed bag.
Some people do it well and it is easy to read, but there are others who
do not make it as easy (for me) to read. Lots of posts are not trimmed
enough, or trimmed too much.

I am not advocating top-posting. I just think that different styles are
good for different cases/environments. Blame the person, not the
application for having poor habits and/or being inconsiderate of the
community. :)

Ramit

When people used to correspond by paper mail, they did not photocopy the
entire past correspondence and staple it to the back of their letter. And
then the person responding didn't photocopy the photocopies and post them
back with his response. If somebody did, that would be stupid -- did he
think the sender posted the originals and didn't keep a copy?

If there was a business requirement to make copies of copies of copies,
people would have done it. But there wasn't, and it was stupid and costly
and so they didn't.

With email, it's less costly, but it's equally stupid. Email programs
reduce the cost of making and posting those photocopies to essentially
zero, at least zero for the person pressing Send.

It might be almost free for the sender, but it's still stupid. Nobody
looks at those deep email trails. When you want to find out the order of
correspondence, you sort your mail folder by Thread or by Date and look
at it there, not by trying to interpret the copies of copies of copies of
past discussions. Nobody uses them. They just bulk up email and get in
the way of communication and make searching for relevant emails harder.

I've had to dig through email archives for legal purposes, looking for
evidence in legal cases, and having to read past copies of copies of
copies of copies (down to ten or twelve levels deep!!!) makes the process
much, much, much harder than it should be.

Top posting in and of itself is not always bad. But the practice of
leaving copies of copies of copies in the body of the email is beyond
stupid. If they were *attachments* that could be ignored when printed,
that would be *almost* sane, but putting them in the body of the email is
insane.

People with Hotmail accounts used to be known as "Metoobees" because of
their tendency to reply to long posts with a single line at the very end,
"Me too!".

BTW: You omitted the attribution line for the text you quoted, whom do
you blame for that? That said, "Nonsense" is a strong enough word to
start a flamewar... not nice.

;^)