People never cease to astound me. And not in a good way.
Reading mailing lists is an excellent way to really see some of the dregs of electronic humanity. Here are some of my pet peeves:
Top-Posting
Seriously. Do you read upside down? Are you too lazy to reply properly, or have you no concept of “in-line reply”? Back in the old days, back to BBS’s, when you replied to someone’s message, especially one that was going to be read by dozens or hundreds of others — who you knew were also going to be involved in an unknowable number of other related and unrelated threads — you made sure that you left a hint of the previous conversation before your reply. This acted as a gentle refresher on the topic at hand, and let a reader understand the context of your reply.
Quite straight forward and courteous, really.
Now top-posting, I believe came about by a Microsoft email client onto unsuspecting, ignorant masses, and has henceforth become the defacto standard of message response format. In other words, quote every other Darwin-damned thing in the entire history of the conversation, and prepend your reply at the top. It’s unnatural. If one was feeling masochistic enough to follow the thread (note that we’re already fighting against logic here, because we really want to read a thread beginning to end, which implies top to bottom), from the beginning then we must go to the end, scroll up a bit to find the start of the last message, then read down. Then we scroll back up to the start of the second to last message, then read down. And so on until we’ve zig-zagged our path illogically through the entire message until we finally get to the last reponse, all the way at the beginning of the message. Make sense to you? If it does, the next bus leaving Earth should be a long soon. Make sure to have your ticket ready.
Not Trimming
Now some people have come to grips with in-line replies, but only on a most basic fundamental level. But at least they’re on the road to recovery, so it’s a good start. However, they don’t trim. And by trim, I mean removing all the extraneous parts of a message.
At its simplest, you want to remove (or trim) everything in the previous email that you’re not directly replying to, or that doesn’t help give context to what you’re saying.
For example, replying to the first paragraph, but leaving two other paragraphs dangling below that you haven’t replied to is stupid. Especially if it’s long enough that someone has to scroll down to find there’s nothing else to read.
If you’re not replying to it, cut it out.
And don’t leave a quoted signature:
> Regards, Bob
WTF is up with that? Oh yeah, and leave a gap of at least one blank line between your reply and the quote so we can distinguish them. Some mail clients wrap lines badly and the replies can sometimes run right off the quote.
TXT Typing
A few years ago we used to laugh at people who typed email messages as if they were TXTing on a cellphone; however, in this day and age, cellphone use to read and write emails is common. However, if you’re going to post on a mailing list that will be seen by hundreds, or sometimes thousands of people, do us the courtesy of using a computer with a real keyboard. You look like an ignorant teen wn u wrt lk dis.
And get rid of that damn “Sent from my iPhone” wank sig. I have a mail filter that bins those messages, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
If you don’t have the courtesy to write complete sentences, then we won’t take the courtesy of responding to you, or treating you like a human being.
CCing the Original Author
You’re on a mailing list and you’re replying to a message. You can take it as a given that the person you’re replying to is also on the list, or else they wouldn’t have been able to post in the first place. Why the fuck are you CCing them? Is your brain malfunctioning?
Starting a New Thread by Replying to an Old One
This is the ultimate in lazy and ignorant email use. Most people have no idea that email messages store threading information. There’s a message header called In-Reply-To that tracks the message ID of the message you’re (funnily enough) replying to. Mail clients can use this information to show you threads in correct sequence of their replies. It’s an extraordinarily useful way of reading mailing lists, but it’s often ruined by lazy pricks who start new threads right in the middle of an old one.
The lazy person wants to post a message to a mailing list, so he (we’ll assume he for the rest of this conversation so I don’t have to make everyone trans- or indeterminate gender) will reply to an existing message, change the subject and type in his message. So in a thread we find things going along nicely until BAM there’s a different thread in there nested eight levels deep. WTF? How’d that get in there? Oh yeah, the poster was a lazy douche.
How hard is it to copy the mailing list address from an existing message, then paste it into a new message? It’s only a couple of clicks more and a few bytes of your copypasta buffer wasted.
HTML Emails
This is less of an issue these days because I use Claws-Mail and it allows me to view all messages in plain text until I click on the HTML tab. But you’re still lame.
Conclusion
So the basic gist of this is that you should think before you post on a mailing list. If it’s a one-on-one email conversation, or a small group at your work, do what you want, but when you’re on a public mailing list, you have to think about what you’re doing.
The main goal of formatting your email is to make it readable and coherent to someone reading it. It’s really not that hard.
Uncategorized