In Stop sending annoying email, Roger Johansson has responded to Merlin Mann’s Five email tics I’d love for you to lose and, once again, sparked the discussion of top posting. In your opinion, which of these is the worst habit?
- Top posting.
- HTML mail.
Does your opinion of top posting change when the choice is between top posted HTML mail or inline posted HTML mail?
HTML mail is worse, no discussion.
Top posting is somewhat silly, but I can live with it, assuming that everyone does it, consistently. What’s bad is when quoting styles get mixed up – that makes mail really hard to read.
I think I’m the only one in this company (which uses Outlook – *shudder*) who quotes properly and sends in plain text whenever there is no value in extra formatting. This creates a great mismatch: people are used to top-posting and seeing the indented trail of the last seven emails, then I come along and ruin it all.
I can’t choose between these two gripes. I prefer proper quoting, but it can be nice to have an email trail to look back upon. Eg. when Bob sends me a one line question, it often comes with the context as to why he’s asking. If Bob were to flesh out the one-liner into a proper email, I’d be fine, but people aren’t good at this. (And many people don’t fully read long emails.)
I don’t object to HTML email as much as getting an attached Word doc (or worse, one Powerpoint slide) that contains ony simple text, but I do have a big problem with the way Outlook quotes emails. Basically, it doesn’t. So #1 gripe would be inline quoting of HTML email when it’s not clear where the quote ends and the new stuff starts.
Nathan, have you tried installing and setting up a descent mail client like Thunderbird on your own system? That’s what I’ve done at all companies I’ve worked for and if they try to tell me otherwise, I just say no and tell them to go away. Alternatively, you could try using Quote Fix which I’m told fixes a lot of problems, though I’ve never needed to use it myself.
I agree about word docs and powerpoint slides in general, but I accept Word docs for internal email since we all have Word installed anyway and there’s usually a good reason for it to be a word doc.
Not only can I tolerate top-posting, but I even do it myself on occasion. While some NNTP newsgroups insist on bottom-posting, others insist on top-posting. I often interline my reply within a quoted message, with my comments directly below the specific paragraph to which I am replying.
I can’t stand HTML mail. Usually, there is no good reason why a message can’t be in plain ASCII. I download all my E-mail before reading; and (like almost half of those who access the Internet from home) I use a dial-up modem. For the same text content, an ASCII message may easily be one-third the size of the corresponding HTML message. Thus, it takes one-third as long to download; and it occupies one-third the disc space.