Re: Gmail and quotes

[Helge Kruse]

2013/11/14 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>> I am in the "e-mail world" for some decades. It was always a good
>> style to write the answer on top of all other text and to not delete
>> anything that has written before.
>
> In a mailing list?  No.
Sorry, you missed one point. I wrote about mails in general. Mailing
list have not been touch until here.

> The _only_ situation where top-posting makes _any_ kind of sense is when
> communicating with the likes of technical support.
When I communicate with my ensemble members I don't have the feeling
of technical support. But top-posting is used frequently.

> If you quote _properly_, namely by _only_ leaving the material _in_
> _place_ that is _relevant_ for the context of the _current_ discussion,
> inviting anybody in is possible at any point of time.
You missed the point again. When you want to CC somebody and have only
the last two or three mails with the _relevant_ context, and CC with
the latest mail to somebody else you don't have _all_ the information
what you _didn't_ found relevant. When you are in in mailing list you
can expect that all readers have the previous mails. That's expected
when the list netiquette is defined. When you are in the world outside
the mailing list you will find other definitions.

> ...  It is obvious to anybody with a brain
I am reluctant to comment this style.

> that storing and sending the same message content _again_ for every
> single mail is ludicrous and leads to quadratic network and storage
> capacity requirements, only limited by today's people's inability to
> lead an extended conversation.
You can find a balance between storage costs and costs to find related
mails. And there's Moore's law.

>  When I write a book,
"When You're a hammer everything looks like a nail." I wouldn't write
a book by writing each chapter as a mail response.

>> Mailing lists use the e-mail transport mechanism to build a community.
>> Here you have invited everybody who has subscribed to the list.
>
[...]
> I am actually reading this list via nntp (news.gmane.org).
So you you have a usenet like working environment. The Gmail frontend
is for mail.

>> Finally we use e-mail in a way different from the mainstream.
>
> No, we don't.  None of my friends top-posts.
So you have a different opinion, that's good. And your friends have
the same, that's fine. But there are a lot of people that have other
experience and opinions, why not?

>> So we will have to live with improvements that doesn't fit with our
>> requirements.
>
> An "improvement" that _does_ _not_ _scale_ is no improvement.
Don't see _scale_ here, since it's not designed for mailing list, sorry.

I think answering inline is most efficient. But I would never say
top-posting must be forbidden for anybody under all circumstances.

Regards
Helge