Hi Daniel,

Daniel Kuehn wrote:
> > Just reply under (below) quoted text (as I did in this mail).
> 
> I see, I am used to the opposite way in a normal email conversation
> on gmail :P Will have to re think when posting to MLs then ^^

Thanks for keeping a good attitude! :)

Although Gmail has a huge number of users, there are thousands of
other email programs and frequently when using mailing lists you are
likely to be communicating with people who are using different email
workflows.


Besides bottom-posting I think it helps a great deal to make email
discussions more readable to drastically trim the amount of quoted
text from previous messages in the conversation (AKA thread) _and_
to break up the quoted text and interleave replies with relevant
quotes. (Always reply below quote though.)

As I see it, the only reason to include any previous text at all is
to provide context for the parts that are being replied to.

An email could easily cover several related things at once, and in a
reply it can be difficult to know what new points related to what
parts of the original message. Interleaving reply text with minimal
quoting helps make this a great deal clearer IMO.

New readers in the thread can benefit greatly from quoted context,
but on the other hand they can never get the full story at once
unless every email includes every previous email. (But that's not a
good idea.)

Old readers are likely to remember much of the context from previous
messages. This means that anything but the absolute bare minimum of
context provided to them is redundant, a waste of time, a waste of
screen real estate (need to scroll past stuff they already know) and
(maybe less important) a waste of bandwidth. Risk is higher that
readers will not bother at all if they need to work more to find out
if your message is useful.

So - please make sure to remove as much as possible from the
message(s) that you are replying to. Sometimes quotes need to be long
to be useful, but most of the time I find that it's easy to remove
95% of previous messages when I reply. Yes - it's more work, but it
saves a lot of time for everyone who is reading your message.


Thanks!

//Peter
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