Michael Adams [mailto:[email protected]] observed: [...] > By the way, top posting is a standard business practise. Not > because it > is best, but because most business employees have never > learned better, > nor feel they should change, and see no reason to learn better > techniques when they are following the main trend sheep-like. Some are > even convinced it is the better method. Unfortunately the practise can > promote misunderstandings when the topic changes even subtly.
Interleaved responses work best in most situations, but for business purposes, top-posting is at least second-best, if not best. Unlike a post to a list, where everybody gets every post at the same time (approximately), in a business environment, it is very common for a conversation to start out with only two or three participants, but to gather more and more addressees as the scope of the discussion expands, or the participants figure out who should be brought in to address the topic or problem. Also, keeping the long trail of past responses within each message allows newcomers (newly CC'd by a current participant) to catch up the history of an ongoing exchange, and it helps to show who has seen which version of the discussion (i.e., my name appears on this branch way back here... But my name doesn't appear on THIS branch until yesterday, so I was unaware of the side-discussion and that's why I have not yet acted upon it... blah, blah.) Also, corporate e-mail users do not have the luxury of simply viewing an archive of their co-workers' conversations (only the IT dept gets that fun). There is no publicly available archive of "private" in-company e-mails, like there is for a public mailing list. However, for a mailing list, none of those problems or requirements exist, and so the best solution is always: a) quote only the text that is necessary for your response (however much or little you need to provide the context) b) interleave your responses following each point or paragraph of the other person's post. But there's never an excuse for leaving anything below your own last remark - certainly not stacks of old indented sigs/taglines and repeating copies of the automated list-administrivia. (Not to say that I don't occasionally forget and leave the junk appended, but forgetting is a reason, not an excuse for the rudeness, and I have at least the grace to blush when I occasionally goof that way.) Cheers, - Kevin The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer without copying or disclosing it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
