ken green wrote:
One thing that threw a wrench in the workings of my perception on this was the idea of a physical Inbox, and realizing that new messages at top more closely resembles a real-world Inbox.
We do it that way since we can't really do any better when managing and organising physical objects which is what snail mail is about. Electronic data offers a lot more flexibility and ease with organizing without presenting practical difficulties.
Take threading for instance. We do this with great ease with e-mail. Try this with your office mail .. quite a challenge just to physically do a batch which is done using TB! at the flick of a switch. With the flick of other switches we can change how we thread. Not practical with snail mail. Now try maintaining the threaded physical mail, something we do automatically with e-mail. Finally, retrieve a thread of physical mail correspondence. Not as easy as e-mail.
Take a nested reply vs a top post. With snail mail, we often send replies with a copy of the original message attached at the back. Why? That's the most convenient way. A nested reply would be ridiculously tedious and not worth the effort. This isn't a problem electronically since we can easily insert text between segments of the original and easily specially mark the original to differentiate it from the reply text. In this way, context is better gleaned and followed. Why restrict ourselves by top posting since this is the format we use with snail mail, when really and truly, on most occasions, we do so out of convenience.
IOW's, what I'm getting at is that e-mail offers advantages that physical mail does not. Why try to restrict e-mail and how we work with it, by working with it the same way in which we are forced to work with snail mail?
Our list rules are based on this premise. All members currently don't, nor will all members ever agree with the rules these lists are bound by. One things for sure, is that the rules are based on a lot of experience with what seems to go well with the majority. Most also go well with the majority outside the scope of this discussion list.
-- -=[ Allie ]=- (List Moderator and fellow end-user)
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