Top-posting Considered Harmful

[prog]

I'm starting to fear that Jeopardy-style quoting is so prevalent now that many people just stop reading as soon as they see their own name in an email.

For example, imagine an email reply that was shaped like exactly like this blog post, with a preamble paragraph like this before I got into actually responding to what you said, which I shall begin to do by pulling a quote from your original message.

On Tuesday, Nov 14, 2006 at 12:01 PM, You wrote:
>
> Hey jmac. Did you know that I like cheese?
>
> It's so delicious. I can't eat enough of it. I wish I had some.
> :(

And here's my response to your dilemma, perhaps telling you where you can find some cheese right around the corner, but you won't read this far because you see the "On Tuesday..." line with all the quoting underneath, and figure that everything afterwards is just a copy of the mail thread so far. But you'd be wrong. No cheese for you.

This has started to cause some real problems, for me, I think. It's annoying but there's little I can do, other than never begin with a preamble if I'm going to do any quote-interleaving. (Leading with a quote never seems to confuse anyone.)

Comments

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Adding "see my responses below" added to the end of the preamble sometimes works.

[spatch]

As much as I am sitting right with you on the "Top-Quoting Breeds Unnecessary Confusion" bus, I am ever so perturbed and embarassed because you swore to me you would keep my deeply-rooted love of cheese a secret. :(

[prog.livejournal.com]

OH CRAP I THOUGHT I HIT "FORWARD"

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

I think it is entirely Outlook/Exchanges fault.

We have Exchange at work, and I hate it for this reason. I have not yet investigated if there is sort of 3rd party plug-in for Outlook that alters this default behavior -- there is NO preference settings for it that I can find.

I spend extra time on all of my work email to NOT top-post the emails, and do in-line quotes. But I am the only person in the company who seems to do this.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Pretty much every mail program that you don't have to be a Linux weenie to use does it, including Apple Mail and GMail. I have done the "hit 'reply', delete the first few blank lines, move cursor down" maneuver so often now that I have muscle memory for it.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

There's advantages to quoting but since hardly anybody does it these days there's no way we're going to re-train everyone whose only experience with email is through Outlook-inspired top-posting clients. "Progress", eh?