begin quoting James G. Sack (jim) as of Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 02:26:08PM -0700: > Recent newbie list traffic reminds me that some people and/or mail > clients do not understand email quoting.
My sister was reading one of my emails from work, and one of her coworkers got a glimpse of her screen. "Oh, look, you've got a geek sending you email!" exclaimed the coworker. The interleaved reply style is recognized as well as being distinctive. > I went looking for intro level howtos on the subject and found: > > This one looks quite nice > http://webfoot.com/advice/email.context.php > This one is perhaps too detailed? > http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/intro.html Meh. Top-posting as a business style makes sense - nobody really respects anyone else anyway, and it's far more important to CYA than to actually communicate. (Superiors dictacte courses of action, and subordinates arse-kiss in response... top-posting makes perfect sense.) (Seriously, it's simply an expression of laziness masquarading as a convenience. But that's common in the business world anyway; something obnoxious that you do not want is done "for your convenience" and nobody blinks an eye.) > There must be many others, and maybe somebody will point out some more > good examples. Write your own. What are /your/ internal rules. Last time this came around, I realized (or was made to realize?) there was on form of top-posting I found acceptable: "Here, take a look at this:" or "As I promised, here's a copy of the email for you:". ...basically, when nothing of substance is being added, and there is no context, only content. The "reply" becomes a foreward. Even then it's almost always necessary to trim. > ==> But one question I wonder about is what are those email clients that > don't seem to generate _any_ quoting. Does anybody have an explanation > and/or hints for those people to make their responses include quotes? Always reply with "I have no idea what you're talking about". > Aside: along the way I encountered other articles that deal more > with posting style, which I'm trying hard ( ;-) ) not to emphasize > here, in favor of helping with the basic idea of quoting. If you're just trying to convey that, look up Lewis Carroll's "Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing"; google brings me this: http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Carroll/Words/ ...but that's been html-ified, with detracts from its readability. -- If you cannot quote, you should at least paraphrase. Stewart "Always Trim!" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
