Why I Am Switching to Interleaved Email Replies and Why You Should Too

http://brooksreview.net/2011/01/interleaved-email/

by showngo • 16 years ago

63 71 16 years ago

runjake• 16 years ago

I think people waste too much time and energy on this debate.

I use & encourage my correspondents to use short, informative subjects -- mostly via leading by example. This way, I can attach some vague context to it.

When I reply to a message, I put my response at the very top of the message. This allows my recipient to receive my message, scan the useful subject line to gain context. He then selects the message and instantly sees my latest response.

He doesn't potentially have to scroll through pages and pages of responses, signatures, taglines, client-mangled quote levels, and compliance footer paragraphs.

It wastes time and it makes no sense. I don't need to read top to bottom because I only want to see the latest bits, and those are ready at the top of the message.

eli• 16 years ago

Didn't we lose the Top Posting debate 20 years ago?

trotsky• 16 years ago

Yeah, that ship sailed a long time ago.

gwern• 16 years ago

Yes, but it's still heartening to see people re-discover it.

It helps confirm that we were right all along, it's still someone doing email better and possibly convincing other people to be better, and it may make people think: 'the geeks were right about interleaved bottom-posting (I now realize after using email enough to compare to their experience), what else were they right about? Standards? FLOSS? Backups?'

bcl• 16 years ago

He just now realized this? Top posting has been frowned on for YEARS. Even back in the BBS/FidoNet days you top posted at your own peril.

The classic description of top posting says it best - http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html

And while you're at it, don't forget to [snip] out the parts that aren't relevant.

mkelly• 16 years ago

Enforcement of the preference for inline replies has (as I understand it) waned greatly in recent years. As I understand it, people who began conversing over email seriously in the late 1990s or early 2000s are much less likely to have learned about this than old-timers.

(I say this as someone who started in the late 90s and later converted to inline replies when I realized their benefit several years later. Many people my own age -- even technical ones -- think my inline replies are abnormal.)

wccrawford• 16 years ago

Too much scanning. Put your reply at the top where I can find it easily and not go hunting for pieces of it all over the places, like the shoes after the dog got ahold of them.

jedberg3• 16 years ago

This isn't me being ageist, but I'm genuinely curious. How old are you?

As I said in my own post, I think older people prefer top posting for some reason.

Just so you know, I'm 33, so I'm already "old" to a lot of the folks here.

bokchoi• 16 years ago

I'm old and I agree with top posting. Interleaved responses are only good for forum archives when a long email thread is forwarded to someone else.

dlsspy• 16 years ago

Interestingly, that's exactly how I read top posted email:

    Yes, I'm not sure I agree with all of that since I just got on the thread and haven't bothered to
    read the entire uncut history of the message, but your point about cats is will understood.

    Bob said:

    > three pages of stuff
    >
    > Alice said:
    >
    >> five pages of stuff
    >>
    >> Sue Said:
    >>
    >>> Something about cats in the middle of four pages of stuff

pjscott3• 16 years ago

Your email client doesn't use obviously distinct visual styles for quoted stuff? When someone writes in interleaved style, I just look at the message-bits, and look at the quoted parts for context. It's easy.

quanticle3• 16 years ago

Regarding that, I hate it when people mix various quoting styles. It causes the quoting system to render text incorrectly.

__david__• 16 years ago

No. Use a mail reader that distinguishes quoted text properly.

Less cheekily, I think an important part of interleave quoting is editing the original email. I think it's poor form to quote an entire 4 paragraph email and put your 1 line answer at the bottom. The better way is to trim it down as much as possible without completely losing the original meaning and then reply. Quite often this you can trim back to a single sentence which is a direct questions. And any sort of background introductory paragraphs can be snipped away completely.

jedberg3• 16 years ago

I've been using inerleaved responses for 20 years. It's the only right way.

The only time I top post is

1) If the reply is not a direct answer to a question, but instead a more general statement

2) If the email had a single question.

Why do I top post for #2? Because most mail readers these days give a preview. A short answer at the top will show up in the preview, so the recipient doesn't have to open the email. This is especially useful on today's mobile devices with small screens.

I never bottom post, because scrolling all the way down is annoying.

* I also top post when dealing with non-technical "old-timers" because they seem to get confused with the interleaved responses.

ScottBurson• 16 years ago

I've been doing it longer than that, but I don't quite agree that "it's the only right way". I top-post maybe half the time now, depending on the kind of reply (as you note) but also my audience's expectations. For example, when replying to a developer list for an open-source project, I'll usually use interleaving because it's the style in that community. In business contexts I'm more likely to top-post because that's what everyone else does (and as another poster noted, Outlook is broken).

I guess we don't disagree too much; I'm just saying I don't try to force interleaving where it's not likely to be appreciated.

jedberg3• 16 years ago

Yeah, when I said "it's the only right way", that was kind of a joke. Should of had a smiley there.

I think we pretty much agree -- I tend to lean towards interleaved, but will top post when it is expected.

rradu• 16 years ago

Good in theory, confusing in practice, especially when the font face and color are the same as the original text.

Also, most people are used to top-posting, and coming across the rare inter-leafing response leads to initial confusion.

henrikschroder• 16 years ago

I started on Fidonet a billion years ago so I know how to do interleaved replies in email if I need to, if everyone else in the same discussion is doing it and knows how.

But every so often you come across people that don't know how to do it, yet wants to, and then you get the weirdest solutions like "see my responses in red", and you have to scan the email yourself instead of having it clearly marked by your email software.

jdludlow• 16 years ago

Font faces and color in email can join top-posting in the bin of terrible ideas.

pjscott3• 16 years ago

What better way to express your personality than by sending all emails in 20-point pink Comic Sans MS, with no paragraph breaks at all?

I've seen several people do this. No exaggeration.

drm237• 16 years ago

People tend to use examples that make their methods really shine. The example conversations in this post work out really well, but they're more like an IM conversation than most email treads I've had. Try a few examples where someone writes a couple of paragraphs and your bottom reply is below the fold. Most people will think you didn't reply, not that they have to scroll to find it.

This is less of a problem with email and more an issue with how email clients display threaded conversations. Does anyone that uses Gmail think this is a problem?

arantius• 16 years ago

> Try a few examples where someone writes a couple of paragraphs and your bottom reply is below the fold. Most people will think you didn't reply, not that they have to scroll to find it.

Then you're quoting incorrectly. (Notice how I quoted only a section of your original, in my reply here.) Proper correspondence includes trimming the quoted section. Not simply leaving the whole thing there.

civilian• 16 years ago

Gmail already does this... welcome to 2005.

torme• 16 years ago

I'm confused, doesn't Gmail do top posting?

TimMontague• 16 years ago

Yes, Gmail does top posting, but the threaded display that Gmail uses shows each message in chronological order from the top down.

hapless• 16 years ago

Some versions Microsoft Outlook incorrectly quote bottom-posted e-mails, causing your reply to be lost in the line noise -- it's greyed out, like the quoted text above it. This bug caused me no end of problems until I found out about it, in 2009.

I had repeated customer complaints about "Blank e-mails" or missed content in my inline replies.

Until the very last Outlook user disappears, I can't risk bottom-posting in business correspondence. You can thank Microsoft for destroying the legibility of e-mail threads.

thwarted• 16 years ago

I "thank" Microsoft for the destruction of a lot of things, more than any other company (maybe there's selection bias there, I work in the same industry they service).

LiveTheDream2• 16 years ago

I always top-post "comments inline below" to avert this problem. Works great.

5teev• 16 years ago

It probably doesn't matter either way, as it doesn't seem like people do more than skim emails. They won't scroll down to read interleaved replies--Outlook/Entourage's text-formatting doesn't help--nor will they even scroll down if your top-post goes past the default view.

If you can't say it all in three short paragraphs, you either have to spread it out over a few more focused emails, spoon-feed over IM, or--horror of horrors--meet in person!

jim_h• 16 years ago

In an ideal world, people would read the entire email and give a short and concise answer to each question. The answer should also have enough clues to reference the question.

It would be 'Sure, Lunch at 1pm on Thursday' instead of 'Sure, Thursday 1pm'.

However, most of the time it doesn't work that way. Some forget questions, give short and vague answers, or just don't reply. Also depending on the email client, the email text doesn't show formatting and the each line is prefixed with > or other characters making it a hassle to pull out text you want and format it just to do squeeze the answer in between.

quanticle3• 16 years ago

The problem with interleaved posting is that it becomes very confusing once you get beyond two or three replies. Especially when you have multiple people, it becomes difficult to track the nesting level of the current line so that one can determine who is "speaking" at the moment.

pjscott3• 16 years ago

On phpBB bulletin boards, the usual custom seems to be to quote the person you're replying to, and maybe the person they quoted, if absolutely necessary. The reply depth should never go high enough to cause problems. This works well.

quanticle3• 16 years ago

That's fine for bulletin boards, where all you have to do is scroll up to read the rest of the history. However, until very recently (i.e. GMail) viewing the history behind a particular e-mail message required you to go back through all your e-mail and find the previous messages in the thread. On a busy list, this could be quite a bit of trouble. Hence, having the entire history in the message itself could be quite useful.

rue2• 16 years ago

You're supposed to prune all extraneous data; usually you can drop off anything beyond 2 levels of quotation and in the cases you cannot, the text is probably well-structured enough.

chipsy• 16 years ago

My brother has a tendency towards long-form, interleaved email correspondence. The result is that every email thread I've ever had with him spins off into an ever-increasing number of simultaneous discussions, all interleaved. We take longer and longer to reply to each other, until one of us just stops, and then it gets picked up again some months later.

dilap3• 16 years ago

Aren't blogs just one giant top-post after another? I think most-recent-at-the-top is actually quite natural for unbounded conversations, where the most-recent posts are likely to be the most relevant, and you almost certainly don't care to read the entire history. Email fits this pretty well.

(As an aside, I think the Q/A nature of the example given is unfair, since Q/A conventionally goes top-down. Compare to this, which seems quite natural

  28
  > How old are you?

It's even more natural and obvious to go bottom-up when multiple layers of quoting are present:

  28
  > How old are you?
  >> I'll answer exactly one personal question.)

As for the interleaved style, it's somewhat a matter of taste, but I find it often creates nitpicky, disjointed conversations; responding in paragraphs rather than lines encourages more cohesive, literarily satisfying exchanges.

jonhendry3• 16 years ago

I don't find those examples natural at all.

dilap3• 16 years ago

Well, fair enough. I find it natural, your mileage may vary. :)

Do you also find the top-posting style of blogs, twitter, &c awkward? I really do think there is something to be said for putting the newest information first.

xyzzyb• 16 years ago

I find them quite natural. When reading a response, the subject of the email has already clued me into the context, I really don't need to re-read what I already sent, even an edited version.

Top answer with my email below for reference, if needed, is what I prefer.

swift• 16 years ago

I concur with your point that in a situation like a blog or Twitter where you don't necessarily care about the contents of previous posts and the information density is low, top-posting is natural.

However, when you DO care about the contents of the previous posts[1], or the information density is higher, I think interleaved posting really starts to shine. When I use email (as opposed to IM, Twitter, etc.) I'm usually discussing technical or business-oriented topics. Precision and context are very important in these discussions, and the emails are often significantly longer than might be common in personal communication. With top-posting, each point or answer is divorced from its context, which can force the reader to jump back and forth in the text to fully understand what's being said, increasing the chances for confusion. Interleaved posting allows me to act as an editor: I remove parts of earlier emails that are irrelevant to the current discussion, group quoted text with the corresponding reply, and add spacing or reorder fragments as needed to improve clarity. I find that in the end, this makes the discussion much easier to follow for the recipient.

For me, the bottom line is that when a misunderstanding could waste much more time than it would take me to do a little editing, the interleaved style really makes sense. When I use email, this is usually the case, since I usually use other mediums for personal communication.

[1] I can't help but think of this privately as: does this discussion have the Markov property?

dilap3• 16 years ago

I agree the interleaved style definitely has its place, and I do use it occasionally, but I find even with highly-topicalized, technical email it can be helpful to simply restate rather than snippet-quote -- it's a chance to verify that you've correctly digested the original point, and you have more control of the flow of your message.

Of course, like so many things, a lot of it comes down to a matter of taste. (Still, I must defend the honor and right-thinking of top-posters :)

lmkg• 16 years ago

Interleaving only works if the email you're replying to consists of separable units that can be replied to individually. Replying to messages with complexity beyond "A/S/L??", I find that replies tend to depend on each other and if you try to quote, or selectively quote, parts of a message and reply to each section, your reply ends up having forward and backward dependencies, splitting up important points between different block quotes, and repeating itself. This is especially true when you have to introduce new information the other person wasn't aware, or if you need to explain your reasoning, or depart from their expected answer format. In short, any time your reply contains anything additional beyond direct answers to the questions. In the real world, most answers entail such additional information.

I know we value each and every precious keystroke, but I tend to stick with that old adage we learned in middle-school of restating the question in your answer. Since you're re-establishing the email context in your own words rather than using the words & order the other person gave you, you have the freedom to structure your reply that best communicates whatever it is you need to add.

My experience is that interleaved replied are also less concise. Re-stating context allows you to summarize it, and it allows you to unify several points into one response. Interleaved replies encourage repetition--I can't tell you how many debates I've seen with point-by-point rebuttals, where the last N-1 chunks all start with "Again," "As I said before," and "Like I just said."

To use the example from the original article: Best reply would be "Thursday sounds great!" Much shorter, and I don't have to re-read what I already wrote to understand it.

rflrob• 16 years ago

As lots of the other comments suggest, I think a highly context dependent approach is probably best. If the email is a response within a group of people, I'll assume that everyone has read the prior email or two (or has access to it in their mail reader). In that case, if my message is a single response to the entire content of the message, then I'll top-post, so within their email reader, they can read only the relevant new bits (my message), then go back to the quoted text below for context if they've forgotten.

On the other hand, if there are specific points that I want to address, I will happily interleave my text, to make it especially clear what I'm responding to. As in everything, look at the context, and see what makes the most sense.

In regards to the "sounds great!" response, the OP was just a poor answer to the question, regardless of whether it was above or below. It would be like if I asked you whether you wanted coffee or tea, and you just said "Yes". While technically true in a Boolean sense, it doesn't help me decide which one to pour.

mentat3• 16 years ago

I may be taking an "old school" approach to this, but I top post. That top post is an actual coherent written document that answers the questions with enough context to make it clear that it's answering questions. If you treat email like chat, then yes, top posting is dumb. However, email can also be an extension of the "letter writing" style of interaction where you don't just answer with one word. I'm not sure that I think it's a good idea for email to evolve into "slow chat".

alextingle• 16 years ago

You are not old school. In fact top-posting is sign that you are a relative newbie.

Long ago there was USENET, and everyone knew how to properly format their posts, and by extension, e-mails. Windows didn't even have a network stack, back then.

metageek• 16 years ago

>Windows didn't even have a network stack, back then.

And then Windows got N+1 network stacks, with incompatibilities. I had escaped by that point, but I heard the tales of woe.

mentat3• 16 years ago

You might want to check your assumptions and read my post. The subject of my entire post was what literary form was appropriate to what medium. I've been using BBSes and the subsequent networks since 300 baud modems. Perhaps I was influenced by a more literate line of programmers and writers but calling me a newbie is ridiculous.

rprasad• 16 years ago

Interleaving is for people who can't write a coherent, self-sufficient response that answers the questions set forth in earlier messages.

I don't want to have to re-read the question every time I get an email; I already know what I asked. I want to know the answer.

The only time interleaving is better is when the answer is short and context-generic, i.e., a "yes" or "no".

jonhendry3• 16 years ago

Interleaving is for people responding point-by-point to a two-thousand-word essay posted to Usenet. If you top-post you're going to have to write more to provide the relevant context to each of your own points. Might as well just interleave your responses, retain the original statements for context, and trim the stuff you're ignoring.

ghshephard• 16 years ago

Bottom/Top posting is like deciding which side of the road to drive on - it's more important to do what everyone else does, rather than follow a "correct" system.

Every Silicon Valley corporation I've ever worked for has followed a top-posting model, ergo, I top post when communicating with them.

On the flip side, Open Source mailing lists like LKML bottom post, so I bottom post when communicating with those communities.

At the end of the day, after 10 years of daily use, I've never really noticed much of a difference between the two systems - as long as everyone uses the same approach consistently within the community, it's pretty straightforward to follow the thread.

dhimes• 16 years ago

Clients should be able to allow you to switch between top and bottom posting at will.

Sapient• 16 years ago

Wave solved this problem really well. I wish it had worked out.

regularfry• 16 years ago

Is the styling broken for anyone else in Chrome?

jcfrei• 16 years ago

If I'm not mistaken this is the default setting in thunderbird.

roc• 16 years ago

My current preferred style of reply is to write replies as self-contained unambiguous answers [1]. It takes maybe a couple seconds of additional thought and typing and the result is far more readable than interleaved.

Speaking of which: as a reformed pedant I have to say that interleaved is a style that only a pedant could love. Most emails simply do not contain questions that demand such precise replies, let alone multiple such questions.

And certainly no-one other than a fellow pedant will ever, ever appreciate an interleaved response. The tone implicit in its structure is somewhere between nitpicky and borderline-argumentative. Even if you stubbornly insist on absolute precision in your replies, do be aware of what the format is saying.

[1] For the "lunch" example in the article, the reply would look something like "I haven't talked to Steve since he left town. Breadsticks sound awesome for Thursday!" with no quote of the original email at all, because the answers are perfectly clear on their own.

The cases where Tyler has forgotten what he asked me, or how, are edge cases far more appropriately resolved by threaded email clients and search. There's simply no call to carry detritus into every conversation when the only upside is saving the recipient a two-second search in a tiny minority of cases.

hkuo• 16 years ago

Interweaving works great as long as a note is included at the top to look below for the replies or comments.

LiveTheDream2• 16 years ago

I think people on HN actually do a great job of interleaving in comments and replies.

tzs• 16 years ago

Once top vs. bottom posting is sorted out, then comes the question of plain text vs. rich text/HTML email. I used to be firmly in the plain text camp, until I realized that was dumb, via a thought experiment.

Imagine a world where we have computers, networks, word processors, the web, and so on, but someone it didn't occur to anyone to come up with email. So, we are still using the postal service for our mail needs. We use computers to compose our mail--but then we print out the document, stuff it in an envelope, attach stamps, and mail it. Finally, it occurs to someone to invent email.

Are they going to invent it as a plain text system? Of course not. They are going to try to make it be as capable as postal mail. Since people sending postal mail send documents that use rich formatting, and have embedded graphics, and have attachments, and so on, email will have those capabilities, too.

Now back to our world. In our world email was invented at a time when we simply did not have the technology to reasonably support those things. It was plain text due to technology limits, not because plain text was better.

Well, those technology limits are gone.

rue2• 16 years ago

Honestly, at this point I'd be happy if I didn't have to suffer people using @somename on mailing lists.

sigzero• 16 years ago

I really hate that format of replies. So, no, I will not be switching to that format.

yason• 16 years ago

People have been battling over top-posting and interleaved quoting for fifteen years, about the time Microsoft introduced their HTML email client that couldn't handle proper quoting without messing up the whole message, and subsequently introducing email to people who couldn't handle even trying to quote properly.

This is nothing new. Anyone who's used to BBS's, usenet, or any pre-Microsoft email will probably assume that interleaved quoting is the only way to properly reply to a message.

antirez• 16 years ago

In general most people with an email don't know how to write an email, what is the right balance between top posting (sometimes it is faster both to write and read), and when instead an interleaved reply is needed.

And when the latter is needed, what is the right amount of email to take, what to remove, where to put a [snip], and so forth. I at this point think this is something that just programmers and other power users can get right.

I'm completely pessimist in the ability of the random internet aware guy to be able to reply well to emails...

purp• 16 years ago

I interleaved for decades, then switched for anything that's not a point-by-point reply. And it's all GMail's fault. You see, top replies are now snippeted in my GMail and on my phone.

I can process email faster that way, as can most folks I converse with.

msg• 16 years ago

I don't find interleaving natural. It would be natural if we were using old school hypertext and reading from anchor in the original text to response in the new text. But as it is, I have to skim a whole email again to find the small portion that changed. If the reply is terse enough, I have to reread the large original to get enough context to understand what they are saying.

If the large portion is snipped, you can't read the whole thread in the final message(s, for forked threads), but have to go spelunking through multiple messages.

Also, on some mail readers it is hard to tell the difference between responses and text indented for visibility, like quoting or code or equations. Replies to replies get really messy.

I also don't like scrolling.

I got used to reverse chronological reading with blogs (the train has almost sailed on them, huh).

What top posting forces you to do is to form one coherent complete thought (if you plan to be understood).

southpolesteve• 16 years ago

Yikes. That article was entirely too long for a topic that is mostly a matter of personal preference.

99% of the email I get works fine for top-posting replies.

daniel02216• 16 years ago

The correct answer is to use a client that does threaded conversations and hidden quotes properly, like Gmail, and then not care about top or bottom posting at all. Seems like an argument only for old fogies who used email in the dark ages.

(Disclaimer: I only started using email for real stuff when Gmail came out.)

billmcneale• 16 years ago

This article only shows examples that supports its points. Most of the long email discussions happen over a period of a few hours and you don't need much context to know what is being discussed. For these kinds of emails (which are the majority of the messages I read every day), interleaved replying is a nuisance since you find yourself having to skip over the same content over and over again.

This is why top posting won this battle a long time ago (when hotmail appeared, pretty much).

motters• 16 years ago

I remember getting into a big argument about top/bottom posting in 1996. I was in favour of having replies underneath the original text, and I still am, because it makes everything easier to read.

Why I Am Switching to Interleaved Email Replies and Why You Should Too

Related Stories