On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 04:16:35PM -0700, Will Yardley wrote: > I do think it's fair to understand that, while for technical mailing > lists and newsgroups, our way of quoting is "correct", that the > conventions are very different in the business world,
FWIW I don't find this at all... In my experience, there's exactly *one* justification for the practice that makes any sense at all, which is the aforementioned adding people to threads, leaving the whole thread intact for context. However, in practice, it's also been my experience that those people still (usually) don't bother to read the quoted thread, and instead just ask someone for a summary. So it ends up being entirely pointless regardless. In the end, I think it's actually about one thing, plain and simple: laziness. > so it's not really surprising that many people don't quote emails > this way, It doesn't surprise me, but for the laziness reason, not any reason related to the conversation content or style. And very often the response is so terse that you have to ask what was intended, wasting even more time (since e-mail threads generally are extremely low bandwidth with large RTT times). > or find it confusing when others do. YMMV but this too, I find, usually just comes down to laziness. It's not that they can't understand, they just don't want to be bothered. Basically any message that contains more than about 3 sentences will be ignored by a subset of its recipients and require some other means of communication. > At some point, being prescriptive only takes you so far; at this > point, we are so far out of the majority that it's not evey funny. This may be true (and I'm not convinced it is) but that does not in any way make it less a bad practice. I think ME had it wrong: It's not that e-mail sucks, it's that the people writing it do. ;-) > As far as the situation where someone else doesn't see that I even > replied, because of the amount of initial quoted material, that isn't a > situation that's really come up for me yet, but I could imagine it > happening. Still laziness--on the part of the person who is (or should be) doing the trimming. But then, I'm old and stubborn, and you probably expected this sort of response from me. =8^) -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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