1 post tagged “email”
I've learned fairly recently that my email composition style is apparently egregiously improper. Like most every other Gmail and Outlook user, when I reply to an email, I post my response at the top of the email and let the program quote the original message below. Old school Usenet types argue that this is improper. One should never quote the entirety of an original message, as the original sender can just look in his own email archives for the original message, the presence of a quote doesn't guarantee that nothing was altered, and sending all that extra text wastes bandwidth. Instead, one should only quote the portions of the original message which are relevant to the response, which should be written below the original quotation. Both Gmail and Outlook, however, place the cursor at the top of the reply, so it takes thought and effort to move the cursor and delete the excess text.
As I said, I only learned recently that I've been committing such etiquette offenses all along, and I have a hard time caring too much. Gmail just hides the extra stuff anyway, and storage isn't an issue. Still, at work I've been playing around with the proper bottom posting style, and I've found that I really like it. Students will often write me with a bunch of different questions, and it's so much clearer to quote each question and respond to each one-by-one. I've gone back to my original, lazy top posting style for most correspondence, but I'll quote and reply when needed, generally whenever the sender has asked more than one or two specific questions. In my reading about the topic, I found Outlook QuoteFix, a handy add-on to Outlook that'll move your cursor and signature to the bottom of all your emails if that's your bag.
While I'm not too stuffy about top vs. bottom posting, I do insist on sending all of my emails as plain text rather than HTML in Outlook. I've also discovered the option (in Outlook's Options > Email Options) to "Read all standard mail in plain text", which means never having to see someone's awful email stationary again.
