[iBook] please unsubscribe my email from list

Fred Stevens K2FRD k2frd at mac.com
Sat Jun 10 11:17:13 PDT 2006


At 11:45 AM -0500 6/10/06, Stan Marks wrote:
>
>Well, there's all that, of course, but it has also become common practice to
>post replies at the *top* of the message before the quoted material (thank
>you MicroSoft) as opposed to posting below the quoted material, which is the
>accepted standard for email and newsgroup messages. When top-posting, one
>may not need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the message to read it
>or reply; therefore, the footers are ignored/missed.
>
>...and, no, I'm NOT trying to start another fight about top-posting! I gave
>up trying to "educate" folks about it long ago. I just keep doing it the
>"right" way and hope that people "get it", at some point. ;)

I prefer bottom posting myself with two caveats: 1) If the quoted material is too long but I want to refer to all of it in my response (or I want to retain all of it for other purposes such as MFRs or if the topic is such that someone else may need to reference other parts to which I did not address my response), I'll top post it. Otherwise, an email surfer will just skip the whole message thinking there is no response; or 2) I'll intersperse my responses within the quotes if separate point-by-point responses are warranted. This really messes with peoples' minds on a forum or group thread when someone wants to respond to my responses; makes quoting the quoter much more difficult.

I had not thought of top-posting as a Micro$oft thing, but now that you mention it, M$ users as a group tend to be lazy and unwilling to scroll aaaaalllllll the way down to read a message's response (with apologies to my M$ friends, relatives, and colleagues who will never see this message anyway since this is a Mac group), let alone unsubscription information. They are also unwilling to do just an itsy bitsy bit of scrolling, homepage checking, or other research on any particular group's or forum's means to unsubscribe. I own and/or moderate some 14 Yahoo Groups; about 1/2 or more of my Groups members (over 5000) are functionally computer illiterate (with many just functionally illiterate) and it doesn't occur to them that there must be some simple means to unsubscribe besides sending a message to the entire group advertising their illiteracy (if they had read and kept the Welcome message [as suggested] or gone to the homepage for unsubscription information, they wouldn't be making such public announcements).

Fred >:-}


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