Top Posting in Email

One of my biggest pet peeves is top posting in email.

People do it all the time and it drives me bonkers.

First, what is top posting? It's pretty self-explanatory. You write an email to someone. When they reply, they hit "reply" and just start typing, leaving everything you said quoted below their added content. They post new content at the top of the email, leaving everything else intact below. Their mail program usually adds more helpful crap in too, like who quoted it, when, who else it was to...nice cruft. Really business-like people add four or five lines of helpful signature at the end declaring that the content is meant for particular users and if you got it in error you should delete blah blah blah...official sounding nonsense that never ever in my searching has ever been tested in court, so it's largely a waste of space.

People who top post generally fall into one of two categories. "I didn't know better, sorry...", and those who come up with every excuse in the book why they do it.

What it really boils down to is they do it because they're lazy.

See, for older people especially, email is instant messaging. Before the Internet became a household phenomena where even Grandma was pecking out how-do-you-do's to people with Outlook Express the idea of mail meant writing something that took a week to get to the other person. If you were lucky you'd have a reply in a week and a half from the recipient. Because of this cost in time and effort people crafted messages to one another. You took time to put some thought into what you were saying.

Email made it really easy to just splat whatever brain fart comes to mind.

I recently had to email out a message to a number of people to coordinate a series of items. The message consisted of several paragraphs with various aspects of the projects spelled out. The first person who replied had one line at the top of my paragraphs: "We can do that next month."

Huh? It took me five minutes of puzzling what he was talking about.

So how should you email people in reply?

I advice you use this thing called common sense. You read the message and quote information back. You address each item you wish to reply to by replying directly under the previous content you are quoting that is relevant to your statement. That way the email should read as either a note that is standalone...in which case you delete the previous content and not quote anything...or your email should read as a conversation.

I used to say the reason I prefer this is because I was literate; creating emails like this makes the message clearly understood. The recipient knows that you are specifically referring to, and doesn't need to think about what you could mean...it clears up ambiguity.

This also trims messages down to take up less space.

It keeps me from having to bounce from the top of a message down and back up again whenever I need to figure out what you're talking about, especially if you combine several topics into one top post.

In short, it makes your messages easier to understand and forces the recipient to concentrate on the message, not translating what you're trying to say.

People who send these to me and I ask them politely not to would sometimes get quite upset...apparently I imply they don't know how to write or they interpret it as such. Here's their typical reasons...

It's how the mail comes up when I hit reply.
(Yeah? So? This goes back to crafting a message.)

I include previous emails like that so I don't need to dig for it in my sent items.
(why do you keep sent items them? Do you work in the Department of Repetition and Redundancy?)

What's the big deal?
(The big deal is that if you're like me and have to deal with a crapload of messages a day, having to spend the extra cycles figuring out what you're talking about gives me a HEADACHE. Not to mention that it makes you far less effective a communicator.)

I understand the message just fine.
(That's nice. Too bad I'm the one that has to understand what you're talking about. If I understand German just fine, is it okay if I email you in German?)

It doesn't hurt anyone doing it that way.
(Except when you accidentally send that bit of sensitive information out to everyone else because you were too lazy to trim it from the quoted portion...whoopsie!)

I've come up with two ways to deal with it. The first is the delete button. I do this in help lists quite a bit. I was volunteering my time to help people using Ubuntu when possible, and in return I had help when I needed it from them. But more and more it seemed people were top-posting in reply. So I started deleting them. I don't need to waste my time on something that is frustrating me.

Sometimes I get messages that are largely irrelevant to me on private emails so I skim and if I think it's nothing I need I hit delete. If someone needed something frome me they'll contact me and I'll ask them for the specific information I needed out of their top-posted message.

The second way I deal with it is to print the message out and then sit to read the relevant information. Environmentally conscious top-posters hate it when I do that; the message was important enough to interrupt me and force me to waste seconds of my life figuring out what you had to say, then it's worth the life of a tree for me to figure out your message without scrolling up and down and up and down. Besides, it had to be important for you send the entire thing, right?

For the most part my irritation at top-posting has gone down considerably since I started doing this and stopped helping people on mailing lists. Once the constant barrage of these type of messages died down I found that having a couple messages once in awhile top-posted didn't bother me as much, probably because in private mails there usually isn't as much material that needed to be followed as a thread of conversation (technical lists have back-and-forths that can span tens of emails).

There's nothing wrong with firing off a one-liner email. It's when you reply quoting my message and I either have no idea what exactly you're referring to because it's ambiguous (which comment did you mean? What are you talking about?) or you quoted my message which had absolutely nothing to do with what you're talking about. Why?? I guess it's part of my Aspergers...but I can't help but think that this is a side effect of the instant messaging and instant gratification culture technology is cultivating. The more I see these types of emails the more I wonder if we really aren't losing something in not having to write things out as actual snail mail messages anymore.

Just...read your message and think about the recipient. Will I understand your message with minimal effort? Do you need the quoted material in there? If not, highlight it and delete it...please!