top posting / reply quoting - attention gmail users (and others)

[Brett Dikeman]

Attention Gmail users- please read the following.

A: well I find it is
Q: really?
A: I mean, it is hard to understand
Q: in which way ?
A: people find it is bad
Q: why do you say so?
A: no, you should not
Q: Should I use top posting?

It has been a standard since the beginning of time that when you  
reply to an email, you trim the text to what you are replying to, and  
place your reply BELOW the quoted text.  This flows naturally like a  
"conversation".  Microsoft Mail was the first email client to change  
this behavior, many moons ago, and many of you 'grew up' on the  
internet thinking it was the right way.  It is not.

Google's Gmail has one flaw which is driving many listmasters around  
the internet absolutely nuts- reply mode, which quotes the ENTIRE  
thread and encourages top-posting and even (from what I've been told)  
re-arranges the order of previously quoted text.

In these days of 1GB email quotas for webmail, DSL+Cablemodem lines,  
etc- it seems like space and bandwidth is of no concern.  It is.

* We have to store every email you send to the lists. The bigger you  
make them, the less we can store given any available resources (this  
extends beyond "disk space"; we have to back up material as well;  
then there's indexing, which either Google does, increasingly poorly  
for us, if they still do it at all- or internal indexing.)  Including  
irrelevant text also decreases the chances of a successful content  
search by someone looking for something specific.

*  When you send emails to 1,500 people (and that's just the quattro  
list) the size of individual messages does add up.  We currently get  
our colocation hosting for free, from a company which is willing to  
do so in part because we're "quiet" residents (our bandwidth needs  
are very low overall).  Think of it like a tenant who doesn't use  
much hot water in the morning before you have to get ready for work.

* Not everyone has DSL or cablemodem, and in some countries, DSL/ 
cablemodems have download caps.  Not everyone downloads their email  
right off via POP; some people use IMAP to store messages on a  
server.  Some people like to keep a few months of list traffic for  
personal reference.  The efficiency of mail servers and mail clients  
drops with mailbox size, and many IMAP servers have size-based quotas  
as well.

I'm not asking everyone to like it, or change their personal  
preferences; how you send your email privately is your business.   
What I am looking for is Gmail users (and others) to please be  
respectful of the long-standing request by Audifans to post in a  
succinct manner.

Please follow the style which myself and others use in replying to  
posts.  You'll find we trim the text we quote substantially, and  
place our replies below the quoted text.  Some email clients have  
preferences which control this behavior- for example, Eudora will, if  
you hold down a modifier key when selecting "reply", only quote the  
text you've selected.  Apple Mail does this by default, no modifier  
keys required; just select the bit you want to reply to, and use the  
reply command.  I can't speak for other email clients, since I have  
no experience with them- but I believe Thunderbird (an excellent,  
free email client) has plugins which enable similar behavior.

Everyone's cooperation on this would be much appreciated.

Brett
-- 
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~brett/