[Cryptography] ADMIN: Periodic reminder about top posting

[Jerry Leichter]

On Aug 4, 2014, at 1:56 PM, Jon Callas <jon at callas.org> wrote:
> 
> On Aug 3, 2014, at 12:55 AM, Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> 
>> Hopefully this won't hijack the conversation too much, but I had a
>> coincidental talk about this yesterday with a non-geek friend who mixes with
>> lots of geeks.  She mentioned that the style of conversation used here, quoted
>> excerpts and short passages as replies, are very much the exception for email
>> exchanges.  The only place she's ever seen it used is by geeks.  The norm for
>> all other people (that she's aware of, obviously it's not a sample of the
>> entire world) is to include the entire message at the bottom (nested
>> arbitrarily deep), and have the reply at the top.  Your mail reader then
>> formats it as required.
>> 
>> This came as something of a surprise to me.
Your friend is right.  I've been criticized by non-geek friends for this style of response - they aren't expecting it and often don't even realize there *is* any reply information embedded within the message.

Most people who've started of with today's mail programs - which place you at the top of the message you're responding to, ready to top-post; you have to do something deliberate to format your mail any other way - just assume "that's the way it's supposed to be" and top post.

> In another anecdote, recently a person who works with me noticed that I that I trim out extraneous stuff, in this style. This person thinks it's great and would like lessons on how to do it.
> 
> Now, there are some mail readers that detect replicated sections in a thread and elide them for you. Mail.app on Mac OS X does it.
gMail was one of the first to do this.  (I'm sure there were others.)  And it's quite aggressive out it - I've seen it hide quoted material *that didn't come from the message being replied to* - it just happened to use the same quote format.  Sometimes this makes message unreadable unless you know to "reveal" the hidden information.

There's a broadly-held view out there that email is a dying technology, destined to be replaced by the immediacy of text messaging.  gMail is deliberately trying to imitate the text message "feel", with mechanisms that allow very quick replies (with limited context), deliberate hiding of previous messages (because, as with text messages, it's assumed your reader has been following along the whole time and *knows* the context), and so on.  Within Google, there's an actively encouraged convention of putting your entire message into the subject line where possible.  (You put EOM at the end of the line to signal that there's no point looking at the (empty) message body.  Think how much time can be saved by not having to open emails!)

Email has never been the *best* medium for careful discussion of issues (in which nuances and context are incredibly important).  I long ago realized that one thing email was remarkably bad at was "inducing conviction":  Email debates tend to go on forever without any participant succeeding in convincing any other participant.  Still, it was *usable* for such purposes, and nothing out there stands ready to supplant it in this role.  (Ah, DEC Notes....)

Text messaging is great for quick conversations that have relatively little nuance or context and don't need to "retain state" for long periods of time.  Perfect for the ADHD side that modern life seems to bring out in all of us.
                                                        -- Jerry

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