thelinuxlink.net

When your receive an email with multiple paragraphs of questions or you are part of a mailing list discussion, how do you format your reponse?

dann wrote:When your receive an email with multiple paragraphs of questions or you are part of a mailing list discussion, how do you format your reponse?

If it's in a mailing list, I would probably do it as you described during the show, threaded within the actual e-mail. Usually that way is best because you're hitting various points most of the time in a mailing list and putting them in context with the questions asked. But for regular e-mails, I just end up responding at the top, mainly because they all start the cursor up there (Exchange, GMail, Yahoo, Comcast, etc.). When I had set up SquirrelMail at work, I started off responding at the bottom, but then people were so used to Exchange's way that I conceded and responded at the top. Although it makes sense to reply at the bottom when you're looking at an e-mail entirely, having to scroll down to read a reply to an e-mail just seems counterintuitive. I guess there's justification for either option.

I always prefer inline and I strip parts when the message is getting too big.

On this topic also see this:
Internet mail: message format issues by Greg Lehey, long time developer of FreeBSD.