Communicating with email: answers

by Greg Lehey Last update: $Date: 2008/09/03 03:54:08 $

This page is an auxiliary page for the main Communicating with email page. You want to read it first.

What's missing from the second reply?

In the main page, we ask the question:

More to the point, though: did the second message address all the points. No, it didn't. Can you see which one it forgot to reply?

The answer: it omits the warning about the dangers of running a damaged gizmo:

  Foogizmos has always warned against attempts to use damaged gizmos;
  please see the warnings supplied with each shipment.  Attempts to use
  a damaged gizmo can be dangerous; apart from the danger of gobubble
  leakage (which you mention), a damaged gizmo may frobulate completely
  out of specification.  This can cause significant damage to the
  environment, not to mention interference to other gizmos.

Yes, it's not that difficult to find the difference, but it's more difficult than it should be, and many people will miss it. Why put yourself to so much trouble?

Don't “bottom-post”

You'll often see people on mailing lists saying “Don't top-post”. This suggests to many people that the correct way to reply to a mail message is to “bottom post”. Admittedly, it's not quite as bad, but it's not much better. Consider our previous badly formatted gizmo reply. This time it's displayed with mutt (to show that it doesn't make much difference):

Mutt displaying bottom-posting

As in the previous example with Microsoft “Outlook”, the text is too wide, and it's difficult to maintain the relationship between original and reply.

$Id: communicating-answers.html,v 1.1 2005/01/05 00:08:22 grog Exp grog $