[wplug] A question of etiquette

[Bill Moran]

"Gregory L. Marx" <gregory.marx at verizon.net> wrote:

> This whole argument IMO reminds me of the HTML/TXT email wars of the 
> early '90s.  People went nuts if you advocated the use of HTML email.  
> And yet here we are 10-years later with nearly all email clients 
> supporting the use of HTML email, many email newsletters only coming in 
> HTML flavor, pipes to the internet getting bigger and bigger ...

I delete email that comes as HTML without reading it.  Unless it's from
a client, in which case I email them and ask them to resend the email as
text, unless it's a big client with tons of money ... but I haven't had
any of those yet.

[...]
> An issue I think that is worse than the *dreaded* top-posting is when 
> people don't trim the message they are responding to.  For me, there's 
> nothing worse than scrolling down past dozens-n-dozens of lines of text, 
> only to be presented with a single word or line for an answer !  Now, 
> that makes my blood boil!  And yet, technically they've done nothing wrong.

Trimming is a tricky issue.  If you trim too much, you lose the context of
the message, but if you trim to little, you end up with the situation you
describe.  I tend to go easy on poor trimming, since it isn't always easy
to know what to trim.

_Poorly_done_ top-posting is another matter.  If I bring up three issues
in an email, and someone top posts three replies, it can frequently be
difficult or impossible to understand WTF issue they meant each reply to
go with.

Top posting also sucks in archives, where you have to read everything
backwards to understand what's going on.  Most people who top-post don't
realize that their messages are being archived, and have never searched
mail archives for something, thus they don't have a context for understanding
why top-posting is a bad idea.

The worst is when I am forwarded a message that has been going back and forth
between two people who both top-post, and I am suddenly supposed to jump in
to the conversation with no previous context.  Many people do this to me, and
it wastes a lot of my time.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com