7 ms·

I've always blamed Microsoft Outlook for the top posting nightmare that has become email standard. I just use stock Apple mail client and always bottom post (a

I've always blamed Microsoft Outlook for the top posting nightmare that has become email standard. I just use stock Apple mail client and always bottom post (and snip as appropriate) and I get so many non tech people who approach me in the hall and ask "how do you do your emails the way you do? can you show me?" My narrative has always been that Gmail simply followed the trend that Microsoft's tools set in motion with their monopoly^H^H^H^H^H^Hy^H^Hpopularity amongst business users. Of course, I'm not even sure how many modern/younger readers will understand why "^H". I'm getting too old for this.

techslave 7y ago
top posting is absolutely fine for the type of low content email generally used by 90% of businesses. always bottom posting is nearly as awful as always top posting. email is for the reader, not the writer. write to your reader’s expectations and to maximize their understanding, not to appease your own sense of what is “correct”
vanniv 7y ago
get off my lawn^W^W^W^W I'm getting old, aren't I.
- mceachen 7y ago
  Oh look at you and your fancy vt100 the lot of us are stuck on vt52s
  - vanniv 7y ago
    lol, I'm not old enough to have ever actually encounter ^W. I learned about it from /.era who made fun of my 5-digit uid
    - jedbrown 7y ago
      Try it at your bash prompt someday.
gamblor956 7y ago
Top posting is the proper place for new content in an email chain to go. It means the new message is prioritized over the history, with the option to have the history of the email chain available if you really want/need it. MS Office was designed to fit business processes, and it does that well. It's not a surprise that Apple's mail client falls over attempting to support business functions.
- sosborn 7y ago
  It doesn’t “fall over.” It gives you the option to choose.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  > MS Office was designed to fit business processes Microsoft Outlook made sense once you (or at least me) realized it was designed to send memo's not email.
- kps 7y ago
  Top posting is completely worthless. All it does is include the message you replied to, which any sane email client can show immediately without having to copy it all.
  - wtmt 7y ago
    I’m not defending top posting here. I’ve noticed a couple of practices in companies (not sure about other environments). One is doing a Reply All, adding a reply body and copying some new people into that thread after several back and forth messages have already been exchanged. Those new people (can) now have the full context of what they’ve received without the person composing the reply having to add context. The second is when people send mails to several others and miss copying some. Then one of the receivers or the sender themselves would do a Reply All and add a “+<person forgotten before>” (or sometimes even use ++ and the name).
  - ethhics 7y ago
    Say someone gets added to an email thread some time after it got started—is there an easier way to get them all of the emails in the thread than having all of the emails as part of the one they were sent?
angott 7y ago
I have an interesting story to tell closely related to this. I used to work as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate computer networking course at UBC. As part of the course, we would usually ask the students to write a simple POP email server, in order to practice their socket programming skills. This was an assignment designed by a professor in the early 2000s, when being able to set up an email client was considered a basic computer skill. Fast forward to 2019, and I can say that roughly 80% of students in the class didn't know what POP, IMAP or SMTP were. Before being able to get started on the assignment, we would have to provide them with additional material explaining how emails are delivered and what an email client does to retrieve them. The majority of students just grew up using the Gmail app or whatever self-configuring email clients they had on their phone/laptop, so they had no idea of what we were asking them to build.
- jefftk 7y ago
  I used to work as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate computer networking course at UBC. As part of the course, we would usually ask the students to write a simple line editor, in order to practice their IO programming skills. This was an assignment designed by a professor in the early 1980s, when being able to work ed was considered a basic computer skill. Fast forward to 1999, and I can say that roughly 80% of students in the class didn't know what ed was. Before being able to get started on the assignment, we would have to provide them with additional material explaining how to use a line editor and why you need one. The majority of students just grew up using Emacs, VI, Notepad or whatever visual editor they had on their computer, so they had no idea of what we were asking them to build.
  - smadge 7y ago
    Email is still widely used by billions of people whereas line editors never were.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      Email is still widely used, but POP is not. Text editors are still widely used but ed is not.
mr_toad 7y ago
I just wish email clients would pick a direction and stick with it. The default on an iPhone is to have the most recent messages at the top. But if you open a thread of messages the most recent within the thread is at the bottom. But inside the individual message, the most recent text is at the top.
II2II 7y ago
I will top post unless I know the recipients are familiar with quoting conventions. I have run into far too many people who become confused otherwise.
Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
If it makes you feel better, I'm in my early 30s, and switched careers to software dev just last year, and I definitely understand "^H." Although I understood it because a veteran guy passed on the story to me a while ago. So I guess the moral is, keep that oral history alive!
Stratoscope 7y ago
I like top posting. My experience has been that snippet-and-reply sometimes leads to an argumentative and confrontational style of discussion, perhaps more than top posting. My theory is that snippet and reply may lead to taking quotes out of context and replying with an uncharitable interpretation of the snippet. So while top posting may be less logical and efficient, I believe it may be more conducive to a friendly discussion. Of course I could be completely mistaken about this, and it was just a coincidence that the communities I was involved in where top posting was heavily criticized had cranky people in them who would have found something to get upset about regardless of posting style. Edit: I don't mean to imply that you are one of those cranky people just because you like bottom posting or snippet and reply! :-) Just observing something I noticed in online forums many years ago.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  > My theory is that snippet and reply may lead to taking quotes out of context and replying with an uncharitable interpretation of the snippet. Whenever you start to see multiple quote snippets appear in an HN (or any forum) comment thread, it's basically guaranteed to have died and splintered into a bunch of uncharitable nit picks. It encourages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop.
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    >Whenever you start to see multiple quote snippets appear in an HN (or any forum) comment thread, it's basically guaranteed to have died and splintered into a bunch of uncharitable nit picks Citation needed. >It encourages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop [Insert smarmy HN-stlye dismissal here] </sarcasm>
  - AYBABTME 7y ago
    As an aside, Gush galloping is eerily similar to amplification attacks.
  - retsibsi 7y ago
    Maybe this is just my innate pedantry talking, but I think the opposite pathology is common too: some people are great at writing convincing but illogical/weakly-supported arguments that only fail when broken down and looked at in a granular, nitpicky way. Strong norms against that sort of response might make discussion threads less annoying on average, but they are also a boon to sophists, charismatic charlatans and sincere but overconfident bullshitters.
na85 7y ago
Can you explain why top-posting is bad/why people care about what IMV is a really irrelevant distinction?
- wtmt 7y ago
  I’ve seen this quip before on why top posting is bad. > A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. > Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? In longer threads, top posting makes it cumbersome to understand which points a responder is replying to. Most top posters (a generalization) tend to avoid point-to-point quotes and answers to establish context. Top posting is easy for a lazy writer, and transfers cognitive load to the readers.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    The quip is stupid, and I don't understand why it's so popular. In reality, top posting looks like this: -- Message 1: Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? Message 2: A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. > Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? -- My point is that you almost never read a single message in isolation, so bottom-posting makes you re-read everything you've just read all over again. If you happened to be reading an individual e-mail from the middle of a chain, bottom-posting would be slightly more convenient (and inline-quoting would lose information). Top posting gives you reverse chronological order, prioritizing what is important, and is friendly for discussions with changing number of recipients.
    - atq2119 7y ago
      Top posting is fine for really shallow conversations. As soon as you attempt to have more complex conversations, say about subtle technical issues, it falls flat on its face and inline quoting becomes far preferable. In a way, this is a culture issue similar to the whole maker schedule vs. manager schedule discussion. A lot of management types engage primarily in shallow conversations[0], and so they may think relying on Outlook is fine, while being totally unaware of the damage it does to the engineering part of the organization (and possibly to themselves). [0] In part this is inherent to a manager's role. For example, in many cases a manager's email may simply be the message "yes, dear direct report, you have formal permission to proceed with your plan". There's just inherently less deep thinking in a management role, when compared to engineering roles. Of course, deep thinking should occur in management as well in plenty of places, and the best managers do recognize that. But unless they come from an engineering culture, they're probably not even aware what they're missing with top posting.
Qqqwxs 7y ago
> Of course, I'm not even sure how many modern/younger readers will understand why "^H". I'm getting too old for this. For all the other modern readers: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html
- teddyh 7y ago
  Excerpt from Hacker Writing Style (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html): — There is also an accepted convention for ‘writing under erasure’; the text> Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ. reads roughly as “Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...”, with irony emphasized. The digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace, and was actually very visible on old-style printing terminals. As the text was being composed the characters would be echoed and printed immediately, and when a correction was made the backspace keystrokes would be echoed with the string ‘^H’. Of course, the final composed text would have no trace of the backspace characters (or the original erroneous text). Accidental writing under erasure occurs when using the Unix talk program to chat interactively to another user. On a PC-style keyboard most users instinctively press the backspace key to delete mistakes, but this may not achieve the desired effect, and merely displays a ^H symbol. The user typically presses backspace a few times before their brain realises the problem — especially likely if the user is a touch-typist — and since each character is transmitted as soon as it is typed, Freudian slips and other inadvertent admissions are (barring network delays) clearly visible for the other user to see. Deliberate use of ^H for writing under erasure parallels (and may have been influenced by) the ironic use of ‘slashouts’ in science-fiction fanzines.
bregma 7y ago
OK boomer. Find me an email app on your phone that doesn't top post (and doesn't do HTML mail by default).
- dang 7y ago
  Personal and generational attacks ("ok boomer" manages to be a toxic blend of both) are not allowed on HN. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. Edit: it looks like you've posted a lot of good comments but also quite a few that break the site guidelines. Could you please take the spirit of the site—thoughtful and curious conversation—more to heart? We'd be grateful.

techslave 7y ago

top posting is absolutely fine for the type of low content email generally used by 90% of businesses. always bottom posting is nearly as awful as always top posting. email is for the reader, not the writer. write to your reader’s expectations and to maximize their understanding, not to appease your own sense of what is “correct”

vanniv 7y ago

get off my lawn^W^W^W^W I'm getting old, aren't I.

mceachen 7y ago
Oh look at you and your fancy vt100 the lot of us are stuck on vt52s
- vanniv 7y ago
  lol, I'm not old enough to have ever actually encounter ^W. I learned about it from /.era who made fun of my 5-digit uid
  - jedbrown 7y ago
    Try it at your bash prompt someday.

gamblor956 7y ago

Top posting is the proper place for new content in an email chain to go. It means the new message is prioritized over the history, with the option to have the history of the email chain available if you really want/need it. MS Office was designed to fit business processes, and it does that well. It's not a surprise that Apple's mail client falls over attempting to support business functions.

sosborn 7y ago
It doesn’t “fall over.” It gives you the option to choose.
Gibbon1 7y ago
> MS Office was designed to fit business processes Microsoft Outlook made sense once you (or at least me) realized it was designed to send memo's not email.
kps 7y ago
Top posting is completely worthless. All it does is include the message you replied to, which any sane email client can show immediately without having to copy it all.
- wtmt 7y ago
  I’m not defending top posting here. I’ve noticed a couple of practices in companies (not sure about other environments). One is doing a Reply All, adding a reply body and copying some new people into that thread after several back and forth messages have already been exchanged. Those new people (can) now have the full context of what they’ve received without the person composing the reply having to add context. The second is when people send mails to several others and miss copying some. Then one of the receivers or the sender themselves would do a Reply All and add a “+<person forgotten before>” (or sometimes even use ++ and the name).
- ethhics 7y ago
  Say someone gets added to an email thread some time after it got started—is there an easier way to get them all of the emails in the thread than having all of the emails as part of the one they were sent?

angott 7y ago

I have an interesting story to tell closely related to this. I used to work as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate computer networking course at UBC. As part of the course, we would usually ask the students to write a simple POP email server, in order to practice their socket programming skills. This was an assignment designed by a professor in the early 2000s, when being able to set up an email client was considered a basic computer skill. Fast forward to 2019, and I can say that roughly 80% of students in the class didn't know what POP, IMAP or SMTP were. Before being able to get started on the assignment, we would have to provide them with additional material explaining how emails are delivered and what an email client does to retrieve them. The majority of students just grew up using the Gmail app or whatever self-configuring email clients they had on their phone/laptop, so they had no idea of what we were asking them to build.

jefftk 7y ago
I used to work as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate computer networking course at UBC. As part of the course, we would usually ask the students to write a simple line editor, in order to practice their IO programming skills. This was an assignment designed by a professor in the early 1980s, when being able to work ed was considered a basic computer skill. Fast forward to 1999, and I can say that roughly 80% of students in the class didn't know what ed was. Before being able to get started on the assignment, we would have to provide them with additional material explaining how to use a line editor and why you need one. The majority of students just grew up using Emacs, VI, Notepad or whatever visual editor they had on their computer, so they had no idea of what we were asking them to build.
- smadge 7y ago
  Email is still widely used by billions of people whereas line editors never were.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    Email is still widely used, but POP is not. Text editors are still widely used but ed is not.

mr_toad 7y ago

I just wish email clients would pick a direction and stick with it. The default on an iPhone is to have the most recent messages at the top. But if you open a thread of messages the most recent within the thread is at the bottom. But inside the individual message, the most recent text is at the top.

II2II 7y ago

I will top post unless I know the recipients are familiar with quoting conventions. I have run into far too many people who become confused otherwise.

Gene_Parmesan 7y ago

If it makes you feel better, I'm in my early 30s, and switched careers to software dev just last year, and I definitely understand "^H." Although I understood it because a veteran guy passed on the story to me a while ago. So I guess the moral is, keep that oral history alive!

Stratoscope 7y ago

I like top posting. My experience has been that snippet-and-reply sometimes leads to an argumentative and confrontational style of discussion, perhaps more than top posting. My theory is that snippet and reply may lead to taking quotes out of context and replying with an uncharitable interpretation of the snippet. So while top posting may be less logical and efficient, I believe it may be more conducive to a friendly discussion. Of course I could be completely mistaken about this, and it was just a coincidence that the communities I was involved in where top posting was heavily criticized had cranky people in them who would have found something to get upset about regardless of posting style. Edit: I don't mean to imply that you are one of those cranky people just because you like bottom posting or snippet and reply! :-) Just observing something I noticed in online forums many years ago.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
> My theory is that snippet and reply may lead to taking quotes out of context and replying with an uncharitable interpretation of the snippet. Whenever you start to see multiple quote snippets appear in an HN (or any forum) comment thread, it's basically guaranteed to have died and splintered into a bunch of uncharitable nit picks. It encourages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  >Whenever you start to see multiple quote snippets appear in an HN (or any forum) comment thread, it's basically guaranteed to have died and splintered into a bunch of uncharitable nit picks Citation needed. >It encourages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop [Insert smarmy HN-stlye dismissal here] </sarcasm>
- AYBABTME 7y ago
  As an aside, Gush galloping is eerily similar to amplification attacks.
- retsibsi 7y ago
  Maybe this is just my innate pedantry talking, but I think the opposite pathology is common too: some people are great at writing convincing but illogical/weakly-supported arguments that only fail when broken down and looked at in a granular, nitpicky way. Strong norms against that sort of response might make discussion threads less annoying on average, but they are also a boon to sophists, charismatic charlatans and sincere but overconfident bullshitters.

na85 7y ago

Can you explain why top-posting is bad/why people care about what IMV is a really irrelevant distinction?

wtmt 7y ago
I’ve seen this quip before on why top posting is bad. > A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. > Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? In longer threads, top posting makes it cumbersome to understand which points a responder is replying to. Most top posters (a generalization) tend to avoid point-to-point quotes and answers to establish context. Top posting is easy for a lazy writer, and transfers cognitive load to the readers.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The quip is stupid, and I don't understand why it's so popular. In reality, top posting looks like this: -- Message 1: Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? Message 2: A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. > Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? -- My point is that you almost never read a single message in isolation, so bottom-posting makes you re-read everything you've just read all over again. If you happened to be reading an individual e-mail from the middle of a chain, bottom-posting would be slightly more convenient (and inline-quoting would lose information). Top posting gives you reverse chronological order, prioritizing what is important, and is friendly for discussions with changing number of recipients.
  - atq2119 7y ago
    Top posting is fine for really shallow conversations. As soon as you attempt to have more complex conversations, say about subtle technical issues, it falls flat on its face and inline quoting becomes far preferable. In a way, this is a culture issue similar to the whole maker schedule vs. manager schedule discussion. A lot of management types engage primarily in shallow conversations[0], and so they may think relying on Outlook is fine, while being totally unaware of the damage it does to the engineering part of the organization (and possibly to themselves). [0] In part this is inherent to a manager's role. For example, in many cases a manager's email may simply be the message "yes, dear direct report, you have formal permission to proceed with your plan". There's just inherently less deep thinking in a management role, when compared to engineering roles. Of course, deep thinking should occur in management as well in plenty of places, and the best managers do recognize that. But unless they come from an engineering culture, they're probably not even aware what they're missing with top posting.

Qqqwxs 7y ago

> Of course, I'm not even sure how many modern/younger readers will understand why "^H". I'm getting too old for this. For all the other modern readers: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html

teddyh 7y ago
Excerpt from Hacker Writing Style (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html): — There is also an accepted convention for ‘writing under erasure’; the text> Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ. reads roughly as “Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...”, with irony emphasized. The digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace, and was actually very visible on old-style printing terminals. As the text was being composed the characters would be echoed and printed immediately, and when a correction was made the backspace keystrokes would be echoed with the string ‘^H’. Of course, the final composed text would have no trace of the backspace characters (or the original erroneous text). Accidental writing under erasure occurs when using the Unix talk program to chat interactively to another user. On a PC-style keyboard most users instinctively press the backspace key to delete mistakes, but this may not achieve the desired effect, and merely displays a ^H symbol. The user typically presses backspace a few times before their brain realises the problem — especially likely if the user is a touch-typist — and since each character is transmitted as soon as it is typed, Freudian slips and other inadvertent admissions are (barring network delays) clearly visible for the other user to see. Deliberate use of ^H for writing under erasure parallels (and may have been influenced by) the ironic use of ‘slashouts’ in science-fiction fanzines.

bregma 7y ago

OK boomer. Find me an email app on your phone that doesn't top post (and doesn't do HTML mail by default).

dang 7y ago
Personal and generational attacks ("ok boomer" manages to be a toxic blend of both) are not allowed on HN. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. Edit: it looks like you've posted a lot of good comments but also quite a few that break the site guidelines. Could you please take the spirit of the site—thoughtful and curious conversation—more to heart? We'd be grateful.