Re: Top posting vs Bottom posting
On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 12:16:12PM EDT, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> In <[🔎] 143f0f6c0903230837k4d6bc8a5r55fe985e829934eb@mail.gmail.com>, Christofer
> C. Bell wrote:
[..]
> Thank goodness my threaded mail reader never shows 4 messages at once.
> (Alright, alright, it *can* but it doesn't do so for me.) That sort of
> display is completely unheard of.
Unless the messages have everything in the subject .. and no body..?
Believe me I've seen a lot of that in the enterprise world .. or half a
line subjects..
As I mentioned elsewhere it's a bit of a cross between e-mail and
instant messaging .. with the advantage that the bean-counters can print
each and every mail and .. file it, I guess.
> >You've already seen what it looks like when top-posted in a modern
> >mail reader (ie; it follows the order in which people normally read
> >text).
> No, it doesn't. The individual messages are hard to read because they are
> backwards. The individual message is what matters because the reader either
> has the whole message or none of it. However, losing a few messages from
> the middle of a thread (or not getting them before their replies) is not
> unheard of, even now.
Happens to me all the time.. a boring thread that I kept deleting and
for some reason or other I want to go back to something from some
subthread or other that I don't have any more.
> I find that this actually happens to me more often now, because my SPAM
> filters will be overzealous and shuffle one or two posters' messages to my
> "Possible SPAM" folder, which I don't check until after I've read the rest
> of the my mail. When everyone has included relevant context (and not too
> much of it) the discussion is still easy to follow.
>
> >The most common arguments for bottom-posting are based on the mail reader
> >people are using, "but without context in my non-threaded, written in 1980
> >mail reader, I can't tell what the post is about."
What mailer are you referring to? I use mutt and it threads messages
reliably, flagging malformed mails that it adds to a thread when it
"thinks" that's where it belongs, allows you to either split or join
threads.. Sure it's not from 1980 .. 1995 .. only wrinkle this mailer
has .. well he's sitting on it.
> No, they are based on the fact that email is not a guaranteed delivery
> service and endpoint or intermediate servers may delay a message for
> days. [1]
>
> Because of this, context needs to be provided and ordered so that each
> message stands alone as much as possible.
>
> >So obviously, what people are using to read their mail is germane to
> >the discussion. In a modern mail reader, top-posted messages are
> >what flow more naturally.
> The thread as a whole may flow slightly more naturally, but even that is
> arguable.
>
> However, even in a threaded mail reader, I still jump into the middle of
> threads all the time. I'll read the first half before work, another part in
> the afternoon, and the final messages over the weekend, for example. It
> helps for each message to contain relevant content so I don't have to go
> back and read the whole thread each time. Since I follow 20+ mailing lists,
> plus my personal and work mail, re-reading messages is not something I do
> much.
>
> Also, for discussions that are archived on the web, it helps for messages to
> have the proper amount of context because search engines and all the other
> methods for finding the page you need can often provide a link into the
> middle or end of a discussion.
Didn't trim .. sums it up better than I could.
CJ
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