[Artemisia] the dreaded and horrible circlets...

[Mike Bradley]

On Jan 20, 2008 8:44 PM, Raven DuLoche wrote:
 <snippy snippy snip>

>
> Hhmmm, so I guess I've been doing it wrong all this time.

Well, *wrong* is a relative term.  The top/bottom dichotomy is really more
of a business & personal vs. newsgroup & message board split.  The *
voluntary*  RFC (1855 if anyone wants to read it), paraphrased, says 'bottom
post and make sure people know where your reply starts' for public
postings.  However, in no small part thanks to the default in MS Outlook,
business and personal usually has top-posting.  I take no sides in the
top/bottom argument because I usually reply inline.

> I find bottom
> posting to be very confusing and I hate having to scroll all the way down
> a
> huge email to get the message the sender is .. um sending.

And for one on one, it's usually faster and easier to top-post.  Both people
probably remember what they said.

> It's far easier
> and quicker for me to get that with a top post, and when I'm replying to a
> post I always trim out what isn't necessary to make it easily understood
> without being cumbersome.

Except all the stuff you didn't snip out of this one...  ;-)

> This email at this point is quite long.  But if
> that's not proper netiquette I'll try to remember to use a bottom post.
> But.... maybe some advice on this would be in order.  Are we really
> supposed
> to keep the entire email intact?

$Diety_of_choice no! Trim, snip, summarize.  Or, if trying to start a flame
war, quote out of context and liberally sprinkle in '...' so that you can
show the other person to be a twit.

>  I get really frustrated by huge long
> emails that take me forever....well never mind, I think I already stated
> that.  So as an example, for this particular post, do I keep it in tact?

Nope, just like I snipped out everything that Yumi, Thomas and Mairie said.

> Or
> do I only keep Sir Thomas's portion and reply to that.  I'm not trying to
> be
> argumentative here; this is a legit question because I really don't know.
>
Basic rule: keep only the parts you are replying to, or that are necessary
for context.

>
> Raven DuLoche
> Confused from Seattle

I bet that doesn't get nearly as many fake orgasms from Meg Ryan.

Conchobhar .... no, really, Mike (who, for as young as he thinks he is ...
was on Compuserve before they invented GIF and used it when they used commas
in the user numbers, had one of the first 1000 accounts on Prodigy,
remembers when USENET started, and at age 10 had an ARPANET bang-path
connection on the Apple ][+ ... crap, I'm getting old)