Re: plaintext email?

[William Herrin <bill () herrin us>]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2019 at 10:37 AM <bzs () theworld com> wrote:
> To me it depends on whether there's any chance the reader won't know
> what precisely you're responding to in which case in-line is
> warranted.

In a one-to-one private email you can reasonably assume that either
the recipient is familiar with the chain of discussion or is
sufficiently invested to scroll down for any missing context.

In a mailing list or multiple-recipient message, that's not a fair
assumption. A more reasonable assumption is that the recipient has not
been monitoring the thread until something specific you wrote caught
their eye. In that situation, asking them to hunt through a long chain
for the little bits of relevant context is, well, rude. And if you run
folks around in circles responding to the same questions because the
context that answered those questions was hard to find, that's even
worse.

Which is why top posting to a mailing list is considered rude. At least IMHO.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com  bill () herrin us
Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>