On Sat, Dec 26, 2015 at 03:15:50PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@archidevsys.co.nz> writes:
> > The motivation of bottom posting like this: is that people get to see
> > the context before the reply, AND emails don't end up getting longer &
> > longer as people reply at the beginning forgetting to trim the now
> > irrelevant stuff at the end.
>
> Of course, this also requires that people have the discipline to trim
> as much as possible of what they're quoting. Otherwise, not only do
> the messages get longer and longer anyway, but you have to scroll to the
> bottom to find what's new.
>
> The general rule for proper email quoting is to quote just enough to
> remind readers what the context is. You are not trying to create a
> complete archive of the whole thread in every message; we have email
> archives for that.
>
> And the reason why this is worth doing is that it shows respect for
> your readers' time. I'm not sure how many people look at each message
> in a popular list like pgsql-general, but surely it's measured in the
> thousands. If you spend a few minutes judiciously cutting quotes and
> interspersing your responses in a logical fashion, that may save each
> reader only a few seconds in reading/understanding your message, but
> that's still a large net savings of time.
Jumping in late here, but I am getting concerned that most web and
mobile email readers make it difficult to inline quote stuff. Trimming
text is particularly hard on mobile devices. As more people use
web-based or mobile email clients, will the "nice" type of email
formatting become rarer and rarer?
--
Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com
+ As you are, so once was I. As I am, so you will be. +
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