[Mailman-Users] The "right" way to reply to a mailing list

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Mar 20 06:29:22 CET 2015


Lindsay Haisley writes:

 > As far as editing, top posting, bottom posting, etc. it's just a matter
 > of using good sense.

But there's one aspect of good sense you left out, namely "When in
Rome...".  This list strongly prefers interlinear posting (posting
below the relevant paragraph) if you reply to more than one point at a
time.

Other lists equally strongly prefer top-posting.

I don't know of anybody who prefers "bottom-posting" (and it's a bad
idea to use that term as I've seen newbies instructed to "bottom-post"
do exactly that, leaving 50 lines of original text and adding two
lines at the bottom).

Which is used does matter, as (1) it's easier to find the new text if
everybody does it the same and (2) I at least make far fewer "the post
has no new content" errors with posts that follow the list convention
than those that don't.


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