Re: [Evolution] A Digression on Digests

[brad <bradhaack fastmail us>]

On Sat, 2011-04-02 at 09:40 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> Nothing to do with Down Under. Corporate email is fixated on top-posting
> as a way to record the entire history of a conversation (since no
> trimming is done either). This is reinforced by email clients such as
> Outlook and now many of the webmail systems including Gmail. In fact if
> you use a BlackBerry it's so ingrained as to be almost impossible to
> avoid (yet another reason that BBs are severely broken IMHO).
>
> However in Internet *mailing lists* we have a different tradition, much
> of it drawn from the Usenet system which was once the principal medium
> for this kind of discussion. Remember that both mailing lists and Usenet
> have eternal archives of everything anyone has ever said, so it's
> unnecessary to quote anything except what you specifically want to
> comment on. Of course most people won't follow this strictly, especially
> for short messages, but use your judgment.

Nothing to do w/ corporate email or BB's.  It's much easier to reply &
it's much easier to read a sequence of emails that are top posted.  You
can see what was said at the top of the email and move on.  If it's
bottom posted you have to scroll down to the bottom.  
Tightly trimmed & bottom posted is OK & that's what is strictly
encouraged on this list so we should comply.
Traditions don't always make sense forever.  Bandwidth and memory are
cheaper than time.