[Tutor] Tutor Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5

[Alan Gauld]

On 05/12/12 20:50, Prasad, Ramit wrote:

> Maybe I am in the minority, but the only people I know who regularly
> bottom/in-line post are regularly on mailing lists.

This is a bad practice picked up from group-ware tools from the 80s/90s 
which unfortunately called themselves email tools, but didn't follow 
email standards - Lotus Notes and MS Outlook being the most obvious 
culprits.

Unfortunately the corporate universe adopted these tools and many 
people's expectations of "email" were formed using these glorified 
message databases. The result is grossly inefficient use (abuse?) of email.

But Ramit is right, the only people I see using email as it was intended 
are the long-term email users on the internet, the great non-technical 
masses use the standards set by the user defaults of Outlook and Notes.

But that doesn't mean we have to accept gross inefficiency without 
protest. Even at work (using Outlook) I use inline posting as my default 
and one or two others have begun to adopt it too. :-)

PS.
Until recently I insisted on using plain text for my mails too but 
eventually I got so many complaints about my mails being hard to format 
for replies that I've relented and switched to HTML...

PPS.
There is one advantage to lazy top posting. When I return from vacation 
I sort by subject and only open the most recent in a thread. That way I 
can read up from the bottom and get all the others in one go. I then 
just delete the rest unread... Thanks to that trick I was able to "read" 
700 emails in two days after returning from a weeks holiday.

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/