Mail etiquette (was: What is this mean by this term)

[Greg Albrecht]

On 18/01/07, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > Top-posting defined simply ...
> >
> > A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
> > Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> > A: Top-posting.
> > Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
>
> > Unfortunately all Micro$lop 'standard' email clients and a few
> > others put the cursor at the top of the email, so the bad habit has
> > developed across the world both domestically and in businesses, to
> > write there, rather than continuing the email thread at the bottom.
>
> "Top posting" is only one issue.  Others of great importance are
> trimming your posts, not breaking the lines into tiny fragments, and
> not writing one-line paragraphs.  Your .sig is a good example of
> things that people should remove from replies.

i've been wanting to chime in on this. perhaps it should be taken into
consideration that a good number of MODERN email clients support
automatic threading of messages. this allows me to see each reply to a
message after the original message, in succession. i understand that
different people configure and use their email clients in different
ways, but why is there such a pandering towards one versus the other.
my email software  (gmail right now but has been mutt and thunderbird
in the past) makes it really easy for me to get the context of a
message as soon as it arrives. perhaps it's time for the rest of the
world to step up and add auto-threading to their mta's?

just my $0.02.

-g

ps: there's no need to reiterate how 'hard' it is for you to have to
'scroll down' to read the original message in a reply, how is that any
different than me having to scroll down to read your reply?

-- 
Greg Albrecht (gregoryba at gmail.com)
An Indie, Hip Hop and IDM Podcast: The Letter G
http://theletterg.org