E-mail Fundamentalism
Lets try to warm up my blogging skills with a little bit of bitching...
Have you ever heard anyone mention something called top posting vs. bottom posting? Chances are rather high that your answer is «No». That is if you live in the real world...
Did you know there is a whole little world of super geeks out there that have religious rules about what is right and wrong when it comes to how you should reply to e-mails? Did you realize that you might have made someone see red and shout at his computer screen that you are stupid because you replied to their e-mail in the "wrong" way?
I am pretty sure that when you reply to an e-mail, that you simply hit reply and type your response at the top. And that if you get a long e-mail and there is no text in black at the top that you might wonder if people accidentally hit the send button before they had written their response. You might maybe start a long, half-hearted, annoying scroll to the bottom...
The main e-mail fundamentalist commandment is: Thou shalt not post your response at the top of the e-mail but rather in between old content and at the bottom.
Just like any other "good" religious fundamentalist, the e-mail fundamentalist will try to force feed their views on you. They will first start out by making hidden condescending remarks on how stupid and ignorant you are. When that isn't understood they will tell you right out that you are pissing them off by being ignorant about e-mail manners. A normal person might at first simply lift their shoulders and respond "but it is so much simpler to just respond at the top and then I don't need to scroll". This is when the e-mail fundamentalist will give you an example that explains to you that you cannot easily read the old e-mails in order. The normal person will give them a blank look and respond "why would I want to read the old stuff again?" The e-mail fundamentalist will start explaining how much mail he gets and how many mailing lists he subscribes to and how much easier it is to read his e-mails this way. Half way through this long explanation the normal person will start rolling their eyes and thinking "what a dork, he needs to get a life!"
I know some of you e-mail fundamentalists. This might come off as being a bit harsh and rude, but I am getting a bit tired of your tyranny. Just like with any other religion I will try to be respectful and do as you wish until it becomes forced. When I see you again and again harassing other people in an impolite, arrogant manner I see no reason in respecting your wishes because you quite obviously do not respect other people's preferences. What you are demanding in the first place is a special preference that isn't particularly user friendly. Just like some other non user friendly things religion has demanded of people in the past ;)
I hate email
Email sucks big time, especially at work.
I'm so sick and tired of people sending me stupid 2MB wmv files with stupid jokes that make my Outlook mailbox overflow and clog up network bandwidth. Hello people!!! Just put your stupid file on a shared drive and let people go see it if they want to. I keep warning these people but they just don't get it.
I hate getting stupid emails that have nothing to do with me just because I'm on a mailing list that I can't opt out of. I get reports about office being shut down due to flooding and earthquakes in countries that I didn't even know we flew to.
I hate people who assume that I know what they said in their email just because they sent it to the stupid big mailing list that I can't opt out of. Hello! I don't read your bullshit and actually I set up a filter so that your stupid emails get auto-deleted.
Oh, and about top-posting. In my environment, just do whatever Outlook makes it easier to do. That's what everyone else will do. But my geek instinct is to bottom-post, and bully everyone into bottom-posting because it's more logical and everybody should follow the same rules with no exception and your cursor should jump to the bottom when you hit Reply because automation makes the world a better place. But I'd be wasting my breath big time if I tried to do that here.
Can you post topless?
I am alternating between inline and top posting. It depends to whom I send the email and what kind of email it is. Like Eirik wrote, a message full of questions or statements that require individual answers, I tend to post inline.
However I'm also very good at stripping out commented text to a bare minimum. Leaving a lot of old text left is worse than top posting. I've seen people inline posting with ten levels of old comments left, it looks AWFUL and is impossible to read!
By the way, I doubt anyone uses STRICT bottom posting. It would make absolutely no sense at all?
Welcome back from "blog-senteria", or whatever it is called when you take a two month pause from blogging now and then.
STRICTLY against!
Thank you! Now lets see how long I can keep the blogging up... not looking promising :(
No I don't think anyone uses STRICT bottom posting. There are however people that are STRICT non top posters :)
It all depends
No Eirik I doubt that you are even a semi e-mail fundamentalist, you are to nice and polite ;) . I am not saying people that prefer that way of posting are fundamentalists. It is only those that try to demand or even scare people into doing so. I have seen some pretty nasty, ignorant, terror e-mails on a certain mailing list that you might remember :) .
I do also post at the bottom and inline. It all depends on the situation really. If I know it is someone that isn't a geek I try to remember to top post so that they don't think I forgot to write something. And I really don't think it is worth it/makes sense to start stripping and scrolling to the bottom of an e-mail just to write WFM (works for me).
And ApocalypticDesire, don't you dare start nagging me about a bug unless you want me to abondon blogging instantly ;) . I get enough of those at work!
I couldnt let this pass
I couldnt let this pass without some kind of comment, on one hand i do agree with you, there are some people who take top posting v bottom posting *far* to seriously.
Personally i see the benefits of both and usually make a snap decision based on who I am emailing or what i have to reply too. In a business setting i think that bottom/inline posting is more common than outside. (but i'm still amazed my sister top posts) An email might contain more than one question and its easier to post inline than not obviously, but if its a short quick answer then i often reply with a quick top post!
I rarely snip/reduce emails though, i'm way too lazy for that
p.s. there is some link hidden behind this comment window, which in 9.5 opens when i try and click on a certain part of the text! file a bug...
According to this
According to this description, I'm a semi-fundamentalist, if that's even possible :)
Whenever an email contains several questions or items I need to comment on, I reply inline while snipping and keeping enough of the original text to have the author of the email understand what I'm commenting on or replying to.
I _hate_ people who use caps in emails, even though most of them don't realize that us geeks consider it shouting ;)
To comment on your more general observation and point, I agree that if you don't talk to people in a respectful and polite manner, you don't deserve having them listen to you or even consider trying to comply with your wishes - be it a differently formatted email, or anything else for that matter :)