[Mailman-Users] The "right" way to reply to a mailing list

[Bernd Petrovitsch]

On Don, 2015-03-19 at 17:45 -0700, Mark Sapiro wrote:
[...]

also +1 for the "quote only relevant and answer inline directly below
it" style - an email is written once and read (hopefully;-) more often
so it is actually extremely unfriendly (because time killing) to all
others to make a mail not as simple and easy readable as possible to
save everybody's time (otherwise people might not even read the mail
past line 2 and after a few of this mails, one might remember the
"\seen" - if not worse - flag in the sieve script).

> And some people on the list continue to insist that they like top
> posting with full quoting because they only have to read the latest post
> in a thread (albeit from the bottom up), even though it's been pointed

They seem to read only a few mails a day and the contents must be quite
simple.
Otherwise one - at least me - really needs to know the context and which
aspect of the quoted/original mail is actually meant/answered.

> out to them multiple times that threads are trees and even if everyone
> quotes everything, any particular leaf only contains the posts on that
> branch.
> 
> Top posting with full quoting is also encouraged by MUAs like Gmail's
> web client that hide the quoted material unless you ask for it.

The various Outlooks have the same design fault - especially as it's the
default behaviour.

> I do understand that in some business situations (contract negotiations,
> attorney/client communication and the like), it is useful and pretty
> much demanded that each message contain the full transcript of what went
> before, but this has no place on an email discussion list.

Well, I store such possibly important mails (ans MLs usually have
archives somewhere) so full-quoting everything on every mail is pretty
pointless (and in some "commercial" situations one would archive every
mail automatically anyways ...).

And most people make no difference on the situations and/or
circumstances (like in "I always sent mail in this way so it must be
correct!").

In lots of proprietary/hidden "environments" people actually do not
think about the information flow and solve lots of problems (not all!)
with MLs but just sent mail to (presumed) involved people.
And if a new one is included, one - or more all of them - have the
excuse to have always full-quoted/top-posted everything.
The real fun starts if such mails leave the company and the outside gets
knowledge on who is really involved on the other side and factual
internal details ....

Kind regards,
	Bernd
-- 
"I dislike type abstraction if it has no real reason. And saving
on typing is not a good reason - if your typing speed is the main
issue when you're coding, you're doing something seriously wrong."
    - Linus Torvalds