In Support of "Top Posting"

All over the web, on mailing lists, especially in the open source geek circles [1], top posting is frowned upon. Even while bottom posting, you're not considered cultured if you don't truncate the parent post to the exact specific part(s) your reply pertains to. I, too, used to follow this religiously until recently.

After three years of communicating with non-geeks (you know, the business and marketing types), I realized that a lot of business communication was simply not possible in the typical quote-reply-quote-reply format that is prevelant on mailing lists. This is because of a couple of reasons, which I'll try to enumerate in the following paragraphs.

One of the reasons given for not including the parent post in its entirety is that anyone wanting to refer to the thread can always look up the mailing list archives. Cultured folk should not waste bandwidth and screen real estate by repeating what is available a click away. This is not the case with typical business communication, which starts between two people (with usually their bosses on the CC list -- to be "kept in the loop"). Along the course of a reasonably sized email discussion, the CC list grows exponentially (believe me)! First the bosses' bosses are added -- if the small fry realize that they'll need to save their ass if something goes wrong. Suddenly something is under the purview of a chappy in some other department and him and his boss and boss' boss are added to the list. Later someone realizes that the legal department also needs to be "kept in the loop". Within no time you're having an orgy on email! With each new addition to the CC list you need a place where the latecomers can read-up on the discussion till then. In normal business communication there are no "archives". The latest email, itself, serves as an archive. I've had a tough time catching up on the discussion where each email was regularly truncated by the participants. I had to piece together more than 25 different emails forwarded to me as the "archive" -- believe me, it wasn't an easy task. Therefore it's much better to preserve the entire thread in the body and add your reply to the top of the email.

A side-effect of not having an archive is that you can't really follow the quote-reply-quote-reply pattern ("Comments inline...") very effectively. If five different people are communicating, you suddenly lose track of (a) who said what, (b) in reply to what, and (c) in reply to whom. With an archive, each post can easily be identified on all three parameters. Take away the archives, and within two or three replies you lose track of (a) and (c) very easily. Inline comments, even in business communication, are useful when each paragraph or point in your email can be answered independent of the others. For example, when you're seeking answers to a list of technical questions. However as soon as you want to reply to the reply of your questions you start losing track of (a) and (c). One decent solution I've noticed is prefixing your reply with your name in square brackets. So, a typical email after a couple of back and forth replies looks like:

* Can I pass the customer's shipping address instead of the billing address in the API?
[Alice] It's possible, but why would you want to do it? You already have the billing address in the DB, don't you?
[Bob] Yes, we do -- but we don't want to share it due to privacy concerns.
[Alice] Okay, then you can pass the shipping address.

I've observed a significant side effect of following the quote-reply-quote-reply model of communication -- especially on tech mailing lists. A lot of discussions regularly morph into flame-wars, mudslinging matches, or "preachers preaching the lesser mortals." Don't get me wrong -- the communication style is not the sole reason for discussions going off track. Obviously a lot depends on the attitude of the people involved in the discussion, but I feel the communication style definitely promotes the degeneration of the discussion. When you read a post you generally disagree with, it's very tempting to pick each line, quote it, and try to rebut it individually. It's very easy to get lost in the trees for the woods.

[1] These are the only circles which seem to have a respectable mailing list culture.