[TriLUG] Email: HTML, replies, signatures, and signing

[Kevin Hunter]

At 9:58pm -0400 on Sun, 23 Nov 2008, Jon Carnes wrote:
> +1 for Top posting - It's what folks do naturally... so deal with it.

Trying to stay out of the conversation, but with this I can't resist ... 
No, it's what *you* apparently do naturally, but you != all people.  "So 
deal with it" is a confrontational attitude that doesn't help.

Most of the complaints about different styles of quoting have to deal 
with respect.  Who cares what you pick; but, especially on mailing 
lists, realize that the conversation is not *just* between folks who 
respond.  Others will read the conversation, either as direct 
subscribers of the list, or on the web later.

For the direct subscribers, it's a waste of bandwidth and disk space to 
pass around so much useless data.  You may have broadband access, and 
have unlimited email storage space, but others may not.  (A similar case 
can be made for not using HTML.)

In my experience, folks tend to rationalize by saying "But Gmail does 
the hard work for you, and gives you lots of space."  The space argument 
is good, for not everyone uses Gmail.  Perhaps they "should," but they 
don't, for whatever reasons.  But even those on Gmail do not necessarily 
use the web interface.  As a simple counter-example, I don't.  I use a 
mail client.

For the indirect subscribers, web surfers, forward recipients, etc., 
having the relevant parts of the context easily grokkable/greppable is 
much nicer.  If you've ever searched online and run across an archived 
mail conversation, you'll know to what I'm referring.

I don't care whether you top or bottom post.  But be consistent.  If the 
second person in a thread has already bottom posted, follow suit.  If 
they've top-posted, follow suit.  In either case, snip the irrelevant 
parts.  It truly does not take that long.  And don't claim that you have 
better things to do than "format email."  I, too, have better things to 
do than trying to figure out exactly to what you're responding.

The point is that the respectful thing to do is not be lazy.  By taking 
10 seconds of your time to conform to some space/time saving rules, you 
save 3 seconds of everyone else's time.  But trying to bend everyone 
else to "your" way of doing things is just plain rude.
(N people * 3 sec >> 1 person * 10 sec)

Kevin