Re: Top posting and quoting (was Re: [PLUG] Hauppauge PVR-500 capture...)

[mdecheser@comcast.net]

My $0.02 ... (quotes are paraphrased)

"Top posting without trimming adds unnecessary disk usage and bandwidth."

HDDs are incredibly cheap these days, and compared to the file size of music files, video files and even smaller office documents I handle, the disk space a dozen untrimmed e-mails use is negligible.  As far as bandwidth usage goes, it would be my estimation that virtually everyone on this list has a broadband connection of some sort.  With the vast majority of internet bandwidth being used for torrents, only somewhat recently being surpassed by **spam**, complaining about untrimmed/top posting in legitimate e-mails is laughable.  Just think about how much disk space and bandwidth was munched up on this one thread alone.

"You should use netiquette protocol x/y/z when replying to e-mails."

Each format has its appealing advantages.  In the example of this e-mail thread, there were statements in a few e-mails I wanted to reply to.  If I had the entire thread of each e-mail (placed wherever), it would have made quoting all the statements I wanted to respond to easier, but in this case it wasn't possible.  The same goes for interleaved posting.  Top posting to any particular message was an option but didn't make sense, so I randomly chose the last msg in the queue, blanked the text field and started fresh.  Therefore, bottom posting was not possible.  What should I do now?

"Using this format makes my job easier."

I think it's safe to say most of the people on this list receive hundreds of e-mails a day.  I personally receive somewhere in the 200-300 e-mails-a-day range.  Half of those are spam and don't even get read.  Half of those are processed and either read or not read.  Of that 50%, I maybe respond to one-half to one-third of them.  That's roughly 35-70 e-mails a day.  An arbitrary average of the time spent on each e-mail would be, say, 2 minutes (depending on the content and response, some may be shorter and some may be much longer).  When you take a step back and look at that figure, it seems relatively high and may make you ask yourself, "Why am I squandering so much time dealing with e-mail?"  Just remember that you don't have to shovel manure for a living or do manual labor (no offense intended to the hardworking landscapers of laborers out there), so if you think your job of processing e-mail is hard, have some empathy.

In short, totalitarian insistence upon any particular format of e-mail replying is impractical.  People who use e-mail as a primary form of communication in their occupations rely upon threads as an accountability tool.  I work in the health insurance industry, and trust me ... EVERY message gets saved as per HIPAA compliance.  If I had to instruct over 7000 users how to top/bottom/interleaved post respond to e-mails, I think I would shoot myself. :)  These die-hard habits of netiquette, while still applicable in certain situations, are really just vestiges of the days of yore when people only had text-based mail clients, 20MB hard drives, and 1200 baud modems (of which I am one of those people).  Technology, and the public's demand of its use/application, have both changed and will continue to change.  As people from differing backgrounds, we should be flexible too.  It's a method of survival!

Cheers,

_md
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