The degradation of email replies.

Ooh, my first rant since starting this blog. Goodo!

Maybe it's only me who's getting bent out of shape about this, but I'm getting really frustrated by the formatting in some email replies I see.

There are those where the replier will include or forward the whole of the previous message and just add a single new sentence of their own, at the top or at the bottom. When additional comments keep getting added at the top, you actually have to start at the bottom of the message in order for it to make any sense.

Even more annoying are those that add their one line reply in the middle of the included message and you have to hunt to find what's new. This gets even more difficult if this is the 5th reply. I've recently swapped over to using the Mail app on my iBook, and that uses different colors for different levels of reply text which really helps allieviate this problem but still.

Then there are those that do what I call a nice job. They don't feel the need to include the whole of all the previous messages in this thread. They include just the minimum to make their reply understandable and then give their comments, nicely formatted, adding blank lines where appropriate to make it easily readable.

So if they can do it, whazzup with the rest of these people?

I've thought about it and I think it comes down to one of the following. Feel free to add additional reasons if you reply to this. I'm sure there must be other reasons.

1. These people are so busy, they just don't have the time to spend to make it easy for other people. It also depends on what text editor you are using as well. Some of them make it really hard (or slow) to delete from the current cursor location to the end of the file, so the user just doesn't do that which makes the quality of the replies even worst.
2. Some people want to keep a complete record of everything that has been said in this message thread in a single email message so it's easier to find and archive.
3. Some people just having been taught any other way. I remember when I first starting posting on USENET in the mid 80's, that there were rules of etiquette and you soon got to hear about them if your didn't do the right thing. Some news readers even tried to enforce some of these policies like you must have more new text that quoted text). Perhaps the mailers of today need to get smarter.
4. Some people are just plain lazy.

Is there anything reasonable we can do to improve things here, or should I just suck it up?

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( Jun 03 2004, 06:17:59 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]