On Tue, Jan 15, 2019 at 10:37 AM <b...@theworld.com> wrote: > To me it depends on whether there's any chance the reader won't know > what precisely you're responding to in which case in-line is > warranted.
In a one-to-one private email you can reasonably assume that either the recipient is familiar with the chain of discussion or is sufficiently invested to scroll down for any missing context. In a mailing list or multiple-recipient message, that's not a fair assumption. A more reasonable assumption is that the recipient has not been monitoring the thread until something specific you wrote caught their eye. In that situation, asking them to hunt through a long chain for the little bits of relevant context is, well, rude. And if you run folks around in circles responding to the same questions because the context that answered those questions was hard to find, that's even worse. Which is why top posting to a mailing list is considered rude. At least IMHO. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ her...@dirtside.com b...@herrin.us Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
