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Comment by masnick | Hacker News Reader

Now: how do you politely tell people to follow these guidelines?

Codify these guidelines into a "Standard". Give it a name, say "Email Efficiency Specification". In your automated footer, add:

"This email was composed to comply with the Email Efficiency Specification: http://eespec.org

Once it gets some traction, have profs at b-schools / PHBs at corps mandate it. To sell the idea, call it the 7th sigma or something.

There is this old RFC (from 1995):

It doesn't seem to have had much effect, sadly.

I used to use the academic style with academics, and the clunky style with everyone else.

Now, I just use the academic style with everyone.

And, slowly, it starts to catch on.

In reality, I think we'll have to teach proper email composition in grade school before it becomes standard.

My favourite anti-TOFU (German for Text Oben Fullquote Unten, text above, fullquote below) educational signature is:

  Because it sounds backwards.
  > Why should I not use the style?
  >> Text oben, Fullquote unten. 
  >>> What is TOFU?

But educational email signatures only go so far. I personally consider the struggle against TOFU lost.