I'm fairly new to mailing lists and was wondering what the standard is for forming replies. I generally try to follow the reply direction that the current thread is following but was wondering if there was a standard.
Do I form a reply at the bottom or the top?
also.
Do I include the immediate parent thing I'm replying to or the whole history?
This is way off topic, and an invitation to flame wars. However, I am an idiot...
On Dec 9, 2009, at 11:58 AM, Jack Matier wrote:
I'm fairly new to mailing lists and was wondering what the standard is for forming replies. I generally try to follow the reply direction that the current thread is following but was wondering if there was a standard.
Do I form a reply at the bottom or the top?
Putting your reply at the top of quoted text is called "top-posting." People who bother to have an opinion are against top-posting, because it ruins the logical flow of a conversation. Unfortunately, most mail clients encourage it, but how worthwhile could a reply be if its author can't be bothered to move the cursor?
HOWEVER: Sometimes the choice is forced on you. You're replying to someone who has already top-posted. Some purists stubbornly add their replies at the bottom anyway, but I believe this is a mistake: If top-posting is bad because it breaks the flow, then bottom-posting a top-posted reply breaks the flow even worse.
BETTER is what I've done here: If the person you're replying to makes more than one point, put your reply to each point after quoting the original point.
also.
Do I include the immediate parent thing I'm replying to or the whole history?
Take the absurd case of people who hit Reply and don't touch the quoted text at all, so the instructions at the bottom on how to unsubscribe are repeated again and again. That's just thoughtless and rude. (People who post replies to digests without correcting the subject line are worse; people who reply to digests by _quoting the whole digest_ are simply to be pitied.)
My practice is to quote only as much of the previous post as is necessary for my reply to make sense (if it does at all). If that means nesting the previous post's previous posts, so be it. Make sure every nested quote includes the attribution line ("On Dec 9, 2009, at 11:58 AM, Jack Matier wrote:").
Opinions will differ on how much quoting is necessary to make sense of one's reply. I drop deeper history if I'm not dealing directly with those points. Use your judgment.
I shouldn't have to remind everyone that though I hold them strongly, these are my opinions.
— F
On Dec 9, 2009, at 12:58 PM, Jack Matier wrote:
Do I form a reply at the bottom or the top?
I pretty much agree with Fritz. In a situation like this, where conversations can go on for days and involve multiple people, you need to interleave your responses below the original text while trimming out anything that’s irrelevant to your response. This allows someone to jump in at the 5th or 10th message and still get an idea what’s happening just by reading top to bottom.
And for those Apple Mail users that don’t know of it, this has made my life so much better:
http://code.google.com/p/quotefixformac/
On Dec 9, 2009, at 1:56 PM, Rob McBroom wrote:
Excellent! Thank you for passing that on!
------------------------------------- Dana Kashubeck Lead Web Developer Riemer Reporting Service Inc. http://www.riemer.com
Phone: 440-835-2477 x. 125 Fax: 440-835-4594 -------------------------------------
On Dec 9, 2009, at 1:56 PM, Rob McBroom wrote:
Thanks for that.
Interestingly, that page claims the signature, etc. is removed from the quoted mail, and in this case it was. However, when I try to reply to any other message in this thread it doesn't. I suppose it's because your signature begins with the '--' alone on the line before the signature, as I don't see than on the other messages.
In my prior, unix workaday life, that was automagically inserted in sent mail -- It doesn't appear to be with Mail.app, so why's it in yours? (Or, more relevantly, how's it in yours?)
On Dec 18, 2009, at 7:51 PM, joseph davison wrote:
In my prior, unix workaday life, that was automagically inserted in sent mail -- It doesn't appear to be with Mail.app, so why's it in yours? (Or, more relevantly, how's it in yours?)
I just type ‘-- ’ on the first line of all the signatures I create in Mail. :)
Note the single space after the dashes. I’m not sure how many parsers care about that, but that’s how the old usenet tradition went so I include it.
I haven’t really payed attention to how well QuoteFix does with removing signatures. Trimming out the unwanted text by hand is such a habit, I don’t even notice.
On 9 Dec 2009, at 12:58, Jack Matier wrote:
Do I form a reply at the bottom or the top?
I don't know who originally wrote this piece of wisdom, but I found it at http://www.idallen.com/topposting.html:
A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right. Q: Why should I start my reply below the quoted text?
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: The lost context. Q: What makes top-posted replies harder to read than bottom-posted?
A: Yes. Q: Should I trim down the quoted part of an email to which I'm replying?
(And to Rob McBroom, thanks for the pointer to quotefixformac!)
To: Steven, Dana, Rob, Fritz, (and anyone I missed)
Thanks for all the tips and advice on this subject that I kept on asking myself whenever I'd form a reply. It helps to have standards to understand one another. From here on out:
- I reply top to bottom (bottom-posting) unless another direction is otherwise already in motion. - I only quote relevant snippets pertaining to my reply and I attribute the snippets with who wrote them and when. - I trim the subject so as to not clutter it.
Here's for a clean-list.
Jack
On 09-12-10 6:37 AM, Ed Wong wrote:
Ed,
From the way I see it.
You join a company/organization and learn about their coding standards so people have an easier time navigating around all the code. You join a mailing list and learn about their posting standards for the same reason.
Jack
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Dana Kashubeck -
Ed Wong -
Fritz Anderson -
Jack Matier -
joseph davison -
King, Steven -
Rob McBroom -
s.ross