Why I Am Switching to Interleaved Email Replies and Why You Should Too

Bottom/Top posting is like deciding which side of the road to drive on - it's more important to do what everyone else does, rather than follow a "correct" system.

Every Silicon Valley corporation I've ever worked for has followed a top-posting model, ergo, I top post when communicating with them.

On the flip side, Open Source mailing lists like LKML bottom post, so I bottom post when communicating with those communities.

At the end of the day, after 10 years of daily use, I've never really noticed much of a difference between the two systems - as long as everyone uses the same approach consistently within the community, it's pretty straightforward to follow the thread.

I've been using inerleaved responses for 20 years. It's the only right way.

The only time I top post is

1) If the reply is not a direct answer to a question, but instead a more general statement

2) If the email had a single question.

Why do I top post for #2? Because most mail readers these days give a preview. A short answer at the top will show up in the preview, so the recipient doesn't have to open the email. This is especially useful on today's mobile devices with small screens.

I never bottom post, because scrolling all the way down is annoying.

* I also top post when dealing with non-technical "old-timers" because they seem to get confused with the interleaved responses.

Interleaving only works if the email you're replying to consists of separable units that can be replied to individually. Replying to messages with complexity beyond "A/S/L??", I find that replies tend to depend on each other and if you try to quote, or selectively quote, parts of a message and reply to each section, your reply ends up having forward and backward dependencies, splitting up important points between different block quotes, and repeating itself. This is especially true when you have to introduce new information the other person wasn't aware, or if you need to explain your reasoning, or depart from their expected answer format. In short, any time your reply contains anything additional beyond direct answers to the questions. In the real world, most answers entail such additional information.

I know we value each and every precious keystroke, but I tend to stick with that old adage we learned in middle-school of restating the question in your answer. Since you're re-establishing the email context in your own words rather than using the words & order the other person gave you, you have the freedom to structure your reply that best communicates whatever it is you need to add.

My experience is that interleaved replied are also less concise. Re-stating context allows you to summarize it, and it allows you to unify several points into one response. Interleaved replies encourage repetition--I can't tell you how many debates I've seen with point-by-point rebuttals, where the last N-1 chunks all start with "Again," "As I said before," and "Like I just said."

To use the example from the original article: Best reply would be "Thursday sounds great!" Much shorter, and I don't have to re-read what I already wrote to understand it.

Some versions Microsoft Outlook incorrectly quote bottom-posted e-mails, causing your reply to be lost in the line noise -- it's greyed out, like the quoted text above it. This bug caused me no end of problems until I found out about it, in 2009.

I had repeated customer complaints about "Blank e-mails" or missed content in my inline replies.

Until the very last Outlook user disappears, I can't risk bottom-posting in business correspondence. You can thank Microsoft for destroying the legibility of e-mail threads.

I think people waste too much time and energy on this debate.

I use & encourage my correspondents to use short, informative subjects -- mostly via leading by example. This way, I can attach some vague context to it.

When I reply to a message, I put my response at the very top of the message. This allows my recipient to receive my message, scan the useful subject line to gain context. He then selects the message and instantly sees my latest response.

He doesn't potentially have to scroll through pages and pages of responses, signatures, taglines, client-mangled quote levels, and compliance footer paragraphs.

It wastes time and it makes no sense. I don't need to read top to bottom because I only want to see the latest bits, and those are ready at the top of the message.

Aren't blogs just one giant top-post after another? I think most-recent-at-the-top is actually quite natural for unbounded conversations, where the most-recent posts are likely to be the most relevant, and you almost certainly don't care to read the entire history. Email fits this pretty well.

(As an aside, I think the Q/A nature of the example given is unfair, since Q/A conventionally goes top-down. Compare to this, which seems quite natural

  28
  > How old are you?

It's even more natural and obvious to go bottom-up when multiple layers of quoting are present:

  28
  > How old are you?
  >> I'll answer exactly one personal question.)

As for the interleaved style, it's somewhat a matter of taste, but I find it often creates nitpicky, disjointed conversations; responding in paragraphs rather than lines encourages more cohesive, literarily satisfying exchanges.

He just now realized this? Top posting has been frowned on for YEARS. Even back in the BBS/FidoNet days you top posted at your own peril.

The classic description of top posting says it best - http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html

And while you're at it, don't forget to [snip] out the parts that aren't relevant.

People tend to use examples that make their methods really shine. The example conversations in this post work out really well, but they're more like an IM conversation than most email treads I've had. Try a few examples where someone writes a couple of paragraphs and your bottom reply is below the fold. Most people will think you didn't reply, not that they have to scroll to find it.

This is less of a problem with email and more an issue with how email clients display threaded conversations. Does anyone that uses Gmail think this is a problem?

Didn't we lose the Top Posting debate 20 years ago?

Too much scanning. Put your reply at the top where I can find it easily and not go hunting for pieces of it all over the places, like the shoes after the dog got ahold of them.

The problem with interleaved posting is that it becomes very confusing once you get beyond two or three replies. Especially when you have multiple people, it becomes difficult to track the nesting level of the current line so that one can determine who is "speaking" at the moment.

My current preferred style of reply is to write replies as self-contained unambiguous answers [1]. It takes maybe a couple seconds of additional thought and typing and the result is far more readable than interleaved.

Speaking of which: as a reformed pedant I have to say that interleaved is a style that only a pedant could love. Most emails simply do not contain questions that demand such precise replies, let alone multiple such questions.

And certainly no-one other than a fellow pedant will ever, ever appreciate an interleaved response. The tone implicit in its structure is somewhere between nitpicky and borderline-argumentative. Even if you stubbornly insist on absolute precision in your replies, do be aware of what the format is saying.

[1] For the "lunch" example in the article, the reply would look something like "I haven't talked to Steve since he left town. Breadsticks sound awesome for Thursday!" with no quote of the original email at all, because the answers are perfectly clear on their own.

The cases where Tyler has forgotten what he asked me, or how, are edge cases far more appropriately resolved by threaded email clients and search. There's simply no call to carry detritus into every conversation when the only upside is saving the recipient a two-second search in a tiny minority of cases.

I may be taking an "old school" approach to this, but I top post. That top post is an actual coherent written document that answers the questions with enough context to make it clear that it's answering questions. If you treat email like chat, then yes, top posting is dumb. However, email can also be an extension of the "letter writing" style of interaction where you don't just answer with one word. I'm not sure that I think it's a good idea for email to evolve into "slow chat".

Honestly, at this point I'd be happy if I didn't have to suffer people using @somename on mailing lists.

In general most people with an email don't know how to write an email, what is the right balance between top posting (sometimes it is faster both to write and read), and when instead an interleaved reply is needed.

And when the latter is needed, what is the right amount of email to take, what to remove, where to put a [snip], and so forth. I at this point think this is something that just programmers and other power users can get right.

I'm completely pessimist in the ability of the random internet aware guy to be able to reply well to emails...

Once top vs. bottom posting is sorted out, then comes the question of plain text vs. rich text/HTML email. I used to be firmly in the plain text camp, until I realized that was dumb, via a thought experiment.

Imagine a world where we have computers, networks, word processors, the web, and so on, but someone it didn't occur to anyone to come up with email. So, we are still using the postal service for our mail needs. We use computers to compose our mail--but then we print out the document, stuff it in an envelope, attach stamps, and mail it. Finally, it occurs to someone to invent email.

Are they going to invent it as a plain text system? Of course not. They are going to try to make it be as capable as postal mail. Since people sending postal mail send documents that use rich formatting, and have embedded graphics, and have attachments, and so on, email will have those capabilities, too.

Now back to our world. In our world email was invented at a time when we simply did not have the technology to reasonably support those things. It was plain text due to technology limits, not because plain text was better.

Well, those technology limits are gone.

I don't find interleaving natural. It would be natural if we were using old school hypertext and reading from anchor in the original text to response in the new text. But as it is, I have to skim a whole email again to find the small portion that changed. If the reply is terse enough, I have to reread the large original to get enough context to understand what they are saying.

If the large portion is snipped, you can't read the whole thread in the final message(s, for forked threads), but have to go spelunking through multiple messages.

Also, on some mail readers it is hard to tell the difference between responses and text indented for visibility, like quoting or code or equations. Replies to replies get really messy.

I also don't like scrolling.

I got used to reverse chronological reading with blogs (the train has almost sailed on them, huh).

What top posting forces you to do is to form one coherent complete thought (if you plan to be understood).

The correct answer is to use a client that does threaded conversations and hidden quotes properly, like Gmail, and then not care about top or bottom posting at all. Seems like an argument only for old fogies who used email in the dark ages.

(Disclaimer: I only started using email for real stuff when Gmail came out.)

Good in theory, confusing in practice, especially when the font face and color are the same as the original text.

Also, most people are used to top-posting, and coming across the rare inter-leafing response leads to initial confusion.

In an ideal world, people would read the entire email and give a short and concise answer to each question. The answer should also have enough clues to reference the question.

It would be 'Sure, Lunch at 1pm on Thursday' instead of 'Sure, Thursday 1pm'.

However, most of the time it doesn't work that way. Some forget questions, give short and vague answers, or just don't reply. Also depending on the email client, the email text doesn't show formatting and the each line is prefixed with > or other characters making it a hassle to pull out text you want and format it just to do squeeze the answer in between.

Gmail already does this... welcome to 2005.

People have been battling over top-posting and interleaved quoting for fifteen years, about the time Microsoft introduced their HTML email client that couldn't handle proper quoting without messing up the whole message, and subsequently introducing email to people who couldn't handle even trying to quote properly.

This is nothing new. Anyone who's used to BBS's, usenet, or any pre-Microsoft email will probably assume that interleaved quoting is the only way to properly reply to a message.

This article only shows examples that supports its points. Most of the long email discussions happen over a period of a few hours and you don't need much context to know what is being discussed. For these kinds of emails (which are the majority of the messages I read every day), interleaved replying is a nuisance since you find yourself having to skip over the same content over and over again.

This is why top posting won this battle a long time ago (when hotmail appeared, pretty much).

I interleaved for decades, then switched for anything that's not a point-by-point reply. And it's all GMail's fault. You see, top replies are now snippeted in my GMail and on my phone.

I can process email faster that way, as can most folks I converse with.

I remember getting into a big argument about top/bottom posting in 1996. I was in favour of having replies underneath the original text, and I still am, because it makes everything easier to read.

Yikes. That article was entirely too long for a topic that is mostly a matter of personal preference.

99% of the email I get works fine for top-posting replies.

Interweaving works great as long as a note is included at the top to look below for the replies or comments.

I really hate that format of replies. So, no, I will not be switching to that format.

I think people on HN actually do a great job of interleaving in comments and replies.

If I'm not mistaken this is the default setting in thunderbird.

Is the styling broken for anyone else in Chrome?