On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 23:39:24 -0600, Ian Kelly wrote: > On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 11:11 PM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> > wrote: [...] >> Then you were told that by someone who does not understand email. >> That's equivalent to being told "Don't ever delete any of your code, >> just comment it out". I don't care who's saying that, it's bad advice. > > That depends on what the mail is being used for. For instance there's a > difference between mail-as-dialogue and mail-as-business-process. In the > former it is normal, even polite, to prune as the topic evolves and past > quotations become less relevant.
Exactly. > In the latter it seems more common for > the entire thread to be preserved as a sort of "chain of custody" -- I think this is a rationalisation after the fact, and does not reflect actual practice with email. > this way the next person who needs to see the email thread has full > context as to what needs to happen and where the request is coming from. I think this is wrong. First of all, quite often the newcomer doesn't need or want to see the full *history*. They need to know the *current* situation -- customer X wants to order 50,000 widgets *now*, the fact that seven emails ago they were asking for a quote on 20,000 gadgets is irrelevant. Secondly, as soon as you have three or more people actively taking part is a conversation by email, no single email contains the entire history. So you still have to point the newcomer at some archive where they can see all the emails. Thirdly, even when it is useful to read the entire history, it is far more understandable and efficient to read it in the order that it was written, not in reverse order. I think that the habit of including the entire email history is just a side-effect of the typical corporate laziness and selfishness masquerading as "efficiency". Rather than take five minutes of my time to bring somebody up to speed with a summary telling them exactly what they need to know and nothing but what they need to know, I spend two seconds dumping the entire file in their lap. That's much more efficient! Except that the newcomer then has to spend twenty minutes or an hour and may end up misunderstanding the situation. But that's *his* fault, not mine -- my butt is covered. (You'll notice that nobody ever does this kind of info-dump on high- ranking executives. *Then* they take the time to write an executive summary.) It is, in a way, the corporate equivalent of "RTFM", only enshrined as normal practice rather than seen as a deliberate put-down of somebody who hasn't done their homework. And because it's normal practice, even those who know better end up going along with the flow, because its easier than explaining to their supervisor why their emails are so confusing. And thus the world is made a slightly darker place. -- Steven D'Aprano http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
