Why top-posting is bad

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

[Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html]

On Thursday, 19 August 2004 at  9:48:40 -0400, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> David Kelly said on Aug 19, 2004 at 08:21:05:
>> Providing an introduction to a forwarded message is about the only
>> acceptable time to top-post, as I am doing right now.
>
> Two observations:
>
> 1. While top-posting is bad in the mailing list context, it is often
>    necessary in the corporate context.  It took me a while to
>    appreciate this, but it's much easier for a secretary or a customer
>    support person to look through the bottom of an email for *all*
>    related correspondence than to dig through (possibly weeks-old or
>    months-old) email.  You may have quoted what *you* think is
>    "relevant", but maybe you unknowingly omitted something important,
>    or maybe you didn't but the reader wants to be sure of that too.
>    If you quoted everything, you may as well top-post, rather than
>    force your reader to wade through pages of old stuff before getting
>    to your point.

This is a marginally valid point.  The trouble is that most people are
only semi-literate when it comes to mail.  They don't *understand*
that it's a good idea to limit the size of the messages that people
send.  They usually also don't care, because it's so difficult with
the tools at their disposal, and they don't believe that there are
easier ways to do it.

This leaves me with a problem at work: people send messages which are
in arbitrary order, which have format breakage, and which include a
lot of irrelevant text.  It frequently takes me a long time just to
understand what they're referring to.  How do I reply?  I have to
reply, because it's part of my job, but should I descend to their
level of illiteracy?

I've made the decision that I should not.   I reformat the messages
before replying to them (thus the message

  [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html]

at the top of such replies and

  When replying to this message, please take care not to mutilate the
  original text.  
  For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/email.html

at the bottom).  This may take some time, but at least I can then
understand what's going on (most of the time; some messages leave me
mystified), and the result is legible.

> Stemming from these, while top-posting is annoying for old-timers on
> technical mailing lists, it's unfair to bash newcomers for it or to
> write "Top posters will not be shown the honor of a reply" (many may
> not even know what you mean by "top-posting").

That depends a lot on who you're talking to, of course.  I certainly
wouldn't do it to people at work, even if some of them should know
better.  But sometimes it's worth expressing the fact that people are
more likely to get (voluntary) answers if they express themselves
well; and that includes the presentation of their text.

Greg
--
Note: I discard all HTML mail unseen.
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