Re: Gmail and quotes

[Helge Kruse]

> This interface "improvement" also effectively enforces top-posting: it takes
> extra effort to post replies in the middle of quotes (like a conversation)
> and most people don't care.

I am in the "e-mail world" for some decades. It was always a good
style to write the answer on top of all other text and to not delete
anything that has written before. This makes it easy to save one late
copy of the e-mail conversation and more important to invite more
people to the conversation by extending the CC list. The Gmail
interface support this usable behavior of the user with this
improvement.

Mailing lists use the e-mail transport mechanism to build a community.
Here you have invited everybody who has subscribed to the list. We
just use the medium to have something like a forum without using a
dedicated tool. The pros and cons of e.g. Stackoverflow have been
discussed before. The technical mean what would fit best would have
been the usenet, but that's dead.

Finally we use e-mail in a way different from the mainstream. So we
will have to live with improvements that doesn't fit with our
requirements.

Regards
Helge