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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

    Be brief without being overly terse.  When replying to a message,
    include enough original material to be understood but no more. It
    is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including
    all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.

This is made literally impossible by some email clients and some webmail systems. Some interfaces insist on only allow "top-posting" replies, putting your new text at the top, and quoting the previous email in its entirety. It drives me nuts.

I always quote the portion to which I'm replying, and add my reply below that, and recently a reply came back saying - "I like the way you reply, I'm going to reply in the same style!"

Now I can quote an RFC.

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GMail fucked up email for me.

For a long, I seemed to be the last person in my area to stick to proper quoting, but I'm afraid I've slipped over the past few years. I think I top-quote more often than not, these days. GMail is partially to blame for that.

Gmail made top-quoting unnecessary with the conversation view. You can just click and see the entire conversation above the message you're reading. I'm not sure why they default to putting new text at the top and then display it underneath!

I don't want the entire conversation, I only want the bit that's necessary to understand the reply. Even when I invert the email to put things in chronological order I still need to sieve through laboriously to find the relevant parts. Incredible waste of time.

I've tried sticking to the proper way for a long time (there was even a plugin for Apple Mail at the time), but eventually gave up on it after getting one too many responses of the "I can't see your email, all I see is my own text quoted" type. This saddens me, but I wasn't about to go on some holy crusade of educating everyone I needed to communicate with about the sin of top-posting.

I've also had that problem, and I agree that it's not my job to educate the world in the "One True Way(tm)". However, I still find it more effective to be summarising conversations as I go, so that after 20 back-n-forths I can actually see what's going on. To that end, and to avoid the problem you mention, I start all emails with a variant of:

    Thank you for your email - please find my replies to
    your various points interleaved below, each in context.

I think this became recommended practice in the days when usenet and email delivery was unreliable, bandwidth was expensive, and clients didn't have threaded interfaces or fold quoted sections. It's since been slavishly enforced on newcomers by groups that often have no idea of the original reasons for these protocols and why some may be no longer relevant.

Obviously sometimes it's most efficient to quote and interleave, when you want to reply to several points in a way that would be confusing without it. But with modern systems it's also fine to write a reply that doesn't make sense without the message it's in reply to, or a reply that quotes the whole message.

I've always read the advice as advice for readability. It's just text -- even in ancient times the bandwidth savings were not huge -- text does compress rather well.

[edit: This entire discussion is now at roughly 7K, or 3351 bytes after gzip (this is copy pasted, not the html) -- that's 89 seconds at 300 baud if I do the math correctly.

By comparison, my original reply was 166 bytes and compressed to 146 -- so would download in a fraction of a second. But note how poor the compression ratio is. Still doubt this was born out of a quest to save bandwidth (as most(?) were batch up/downloading discussion-lists at the time. And 300 baud is roughly typing speed -- that's a long time ago.]

It had more to do with the fact that you might be reading a reply to an original you hadn't seen yet, but which would be delivered to you in its entirety... soonish, for varying definitions of the word "soonish". And when I was a kid with 300 entire baud at my command, connection time actually cost money. (In '93, it wouldn't be uncommon for the access gateway to be long distance and charged per minute as well. Oh, Kansas City, how I miss thee not at all.)

Hm, well. I'm still not convinced the fact that you'd get the whole message anyway was very important. Even if you already have (instant) access to the previous mail -- I still much prefer reading a sanely typed/quoted reply. For example when arriving "late" to a discussion on a mailing list.

I don't exactly have fond memories (or more precisely my parents don't) of dialup (and later isdn) access -- we've never really had free local calls in Norway (and still don't). But since I was blasting away at 2400 baud, I was at least downloading faster-than-realtime (as in -- faster than you can read text).

I'd much rather see the reply first - and if I need the context, I can then scroll down to see the quoted message. That way, I don't need to scroll through a lot of context I already know just to see someone's one-line response to it.

Exactly this. This entry must have made sense way-back-when, but users today understand how to keep an email thread alive in their memory, and do not need to read the entire chain, selectively quoted or not, before getting to the reply.

A big impact may simply have been the advent of greater storage and bandwidth capacities allowing bigger emails. Along with that, email clients threading messages for you allows for relatively seamless review of history if necessary.

And, the "selectively quote, then reply below" concept opens the door for biased selective quotations, where anyone getting in on a thread in the middle will likely be misunderstand the true context of the email they're receiving. Better to have the whole history, or none of it.

  > ... users today understand how to keep an email thread
  > alive in their memory, and do not need to read the
  > entire chain, selectively quoted or not, before getting
  > to the reply.

I have literally hundreds of active email conversations. If you think I can understand a reply without first refreshing my memory about the context then you're much mistaken. What you say might be fine for people with just tens of conversations, but there's no way it works for me.

I'm in the same situation - and for those that I don't immediately recall, scrolling down is a simple matter...

See my reply to mattlutze:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6934612

You're clearly outside 2sd so, while I appreciate that you have lots of email chains, you will obviously concede that your outlier case cannot define the conduct of the vast majority of internet users. An outlier case I hope you'll agree I acknowledged:

  >  Along with that, email clients threading messages for you 
  allows for relatively seamless review of history if necessary.

But when replying I don't want the full history. I end up with email messages that are thousands of lines long, usually with several threads in each, and finding the individual separate thread, spread throughout the entire quote-upon-quote-upon-quote ... is just not feasible. I'm left trawling through the same email many, many times, trying to extract the bits that matter to assemble them into a sensible, consistent, coherent narrative.

At least, that's what happens when I use any of the standard email clients. but I don't. I use a really old, completely non-standard email client so I can, on every reply, extract the text that matters and assemble it into a single conversation, which I then continue.

Yes, I freely admit I'm unusual, but I find it incredibly frustrating that all the systems other people say "Well, it works for me" are, in my context, unusable. And when you say:

    > Along with that, email clients threading messages
    > for you allows for relatively seamless review of
    > history if necessary.

... you are buying into the fallacy that what works for you should work for any right-minded person. Having clients thread the messages actually compounds the problems for me.

Quoting at the top doesn't feel right to me.

Scrolling usually happens from top to bottom. While email clients could simply send the scrollbar to the bottom of the page by default, displaying the message from the bottom, letting the user read the quoted message if they want, it would probably be hard to implement without breaking HTML email.

Scrolling from bottom to top is natural when you want to see something again because you already scrolled to the bottom, but it feels weird when you have to first read the bottom of the page, then scroll up.

I think there's a natural analog to newest on top that makes quoting on top feel odd.

The schema for discovering old things is to go down -- any excavation, you find the newest artifacts on top, generally, and older the lower you go. That pile of letters on the kitchen table, newest on top. Grids, pencil sketches, original painting decisions are all underneath the newest layer of paint in a painting.

I ramble, but, the thought that someone could or should summarize a 30 email conversation, and rewrite that summary each time a new email is sent, is just silly to me.

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