A question about top posting.

[Stuart Jansen]

Whee! Another useless flame war!

On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 11:15 -0700, Darwin H. Webb wrote:
> How about everyone just deal with reality and stop trying to control
> others communication style.

How about everyone show a little courtesy. If you want a potential
reader to pay attention, make things as easy as possible for that
reader. If you want to be ignored, go ahead and be a lazy bore.

The more mail a person receives, the more they will appreciate an easy
to understand message. If you stupidly top post, it's the first
indication that your message probably isn't worth wasting time on.

A well trimmed message is also much more useful to people stumbling on
your message in an archive through a google search. Not a big deal when
trying to uselessly justify laziness, but it can be a real help when the
person is trying to track down a solution to an obscure technical
problem.

Sure, my argument does rely on a little altruism. I'm asking for an
extra five seconds of your life, in exchange for saving much more time
cumulatively in the lives of the people that will receive your message.
With time you'll get better at it. I'd estimate that trimming your
message while I replied to it didn't take much more than 500
milliseconds.

> Top posting to me takes into account the volume, time, and effort needed
> to snip, scroll, and copy/paste of a 100 e-mail a day.
> Get real.

Get a real MUA.

Seriously. You're either terminally lazy of you're using lousy software.

-- 
Stuart Jansen <sjansen at gurulabs.com>
Guru Labs, L.C.
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