----- Original Message ----- > From: "Barry Warsaw" <ba...@list.org>
> On Mar 20, 2015, at 08:19 AM, Andrew Stuart wrote: > >When I reply to a message on a mailing list, what is the “right” way > >to do it? > >Should I be deleting previous thread text from my response? > >Should I be adding anything in? > > Of course, Wikipedia is the font of all human knowledge and truth: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_post > > This is an interesting question for me because I think the netiquette > rules > I've been using for decades may be changing. > > I've always found it proper and useful to include the quoted material > of the > original message, but trim the quotes to just the bit you are > responding to. > I'd call this interleaved-with-trimming. The traditional method for technical conversation mailing lists. > Top posting has always been a serious breach of netiquette. > > What I've found interesting is that some of my correspondents (off-list) > actually *want* top posting, and find anything else confusing. I think I > understand why in at least some cases; Apple Mail top posts by default, and > some folks just don't like to go digging around in the email to find the > answer they're looking for. I've actually tried to accommodate that when > sending email to them. If the question has a 1 paragraph or less reply and won't engender a thread, then I can just barely tolerate top posting. If the person replying is on a mobile MUA, where it's a bitch to deal with, I'll tolerate it. Otherwise, I will take the time to clean up their reply, and hope that they catch on. As for actually convincing the MUA to reply the right place, a shocking number don't understand RFC... 5369 headers, and the ones that don't rarely have "Reply to Recipient", which is a decent heuristic for most mailing lists. So you have to reply all, and then the recipient gets the personal copy first, and replies to it off-list, and that way lies madness and sweaty palms... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274 ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
