On Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:27:18 +0100
Miguel Gonçalves <m...@miguelgoncalves.com> wrote:
> I really find it funny (to say the least) that in the XXI
> century people concentrate on form rather than content when
> using such an informal medium as e-mail.
It's not just form. If you have been reading a lot of medium to high
traffic mailingslists with a dozen discussions in parallel on each
list, then you appreciate a lot that people do proper quoting[1].
It makes parsing the relevant parts of the discussion a lot easier,
because you instantly get the context of the response w/o the need
to scroll down, read trough an whole mail and figure out to which
part of it has been replied.
That's why on the usenet (the precessor to mailinglists) top posting
was "forbidden" by the netiquette, and you got into troubles if you
didnt adhere to the netiquette.
And still to this day, on all OSS mailinglist's i'm on, top posting
is at least frowned upon, if not forbidden explicitly.
And most importantly: If the list owner says top posting is a no-no,
then top posting is a no-no. Point. He sets the rules. He could
even require that we use a violett font and include pictures of
rosa ponies in all our mails and we'd have to adhere to it.
And for people claiming "to read a lot of mails", i think this is something
very subjective and highly relative to your context. I know people who
claim that they have a lot of mail, just because they get 20 mails a day.
Others i know cope with way over 1000 mails per day and say they have
only a moderate amount of mail traffic. So, when you claim something in
that regard, also tell some numbers.
Attila Kinali
[1] this includes, trimming mails, using proper quoting characters, quoting
below the relevant text and using lines shorter than 70 characters.
--
The trouble with you, Shev, is you don't say anything until you've saved
up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments and then you dump
them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap
-- Tirin, The Dispossessed, U. Le Guin
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