The September That Never Ended was so long ago that pretty much
everybody from before that event is now well into "get off my lawn"
territory.
Yes, I'm afraid we are.
But I think it's more "get off my net".
...!moskvax!kgbvax!kremvax!brian
No, it isn't a lost art. As you can see, there are some of us who know
perfectly well how to edit, and have e-mail tools that make this easy.
(Using Thunderbird here.) Smartphone mail programs make excerpting a
hard task, by the nature of the human interface.
Making matters worse, Joe SixPack and Suzie Latchhook are not taught to
do it, because of a despicable lack of BOFH personnel.
(Time to take my gout meds.)
People use plain-text e-mail on purpose?
Yes.
only if you want other people to be able to read it
Isn’t the underlying assumption with non-plaintext that: “I know what will work better for you than you do”
(comic-sans, colors, contrasting…) Don’t email users configure their client to display such that it helps them process mail more easily? why would you force your ideas of contrast/color-blindness/etc on other folks? 
There are several folk I refuse mail from at this point because they just don’t get “I can’t see your html email”.
oh well… I suppose procmail does exist for a reason.
-chris
Isn't the underlying assumption with non-plaintext that: "I know what
will work better for you than you do"
as i said in the '90s, mime, a syntax for encoding incompatibility.
(comic-sans, colors, contrasting...)
hey! if it will do magenta comic sans, i may have to recant! 
randy
I suspect that the increasing use of very long lines in the expectation
that the recipient's mail client will wrap them "appropriately"
leads to mail clients reformatting and wrapping lines in complete
disregard for the formatting that the sender used.
For example, the previous paragraph was sent consisting of four
lines. If it didn't display that way for you, your mail client
may have reformatted it. Had I wanted to use the formatting to
convey some information, that would have been lost.
A quote from many years ago that I feel is still relevant:
"Good spelling, punctuation, and formatting are essentially the on-line
equivalent of bathing." -- Elf Sternberg
- Brian
/me gestures at this thread
If you needed more reason that NANOG might not be the place to discuss email issues at any higher level than port numbers, this is it.
(I especially liked the "I use plain text everywhere!" message sent as HTML).
mailop lives at the perpetually-TLS-challenged https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
ietf-smtp lives at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-smtp
Cheers,
Steve
In article <CAL9jLaYkVVoE3j5dohE+SDLkXYhX=FA0eO8zNihUtA1M9AcTLQ@mail.gmail.com> you write:
Isn't the underlying assumption with non-plaintext that: "I know what will
work better for you than you do" ...
No, it's that every MUA in the world has handled html mail for a decade
and it's a waste of time to piss into the wind.
I send most of my mail as unformatted text, but my MUA (alpine)
renders incoming HTML just fine. Time to get over it and waste time
arguing about something else pointless, like when to capitalize internet.
R's,
John
In article <CAL9jLaYkVVoE3j5dohE+SDLkXYhX=FA0eO8zNihUtA1M9AcTLQ@mail.gmail.com> you write:
Isn’t the underlying assumption with non-plaintext that: “I know what will
work better for you than you do” …No, it’s that every MUA in the world has handled html mail for a decade
and it’s a waste of time to piss into the wind.
the breeze is so nice though.
I send most of my mail as unformatted text, but my MUA (alpine)
renders incoming HTML just fine. Time to get over it and waste time
arguing about something else pointless, like when to capitalize internet.
well we COULD argue about ‘inline comment’ or ‘top posting’ …
This involves a number of erroneous assumptions, IMHO…
1. All recipients have the ability to consume either form.
2. HTML cannot offer a better experience to some recipients while remaining semantically
equivalent to the plain text content.
3. The improved recipient experience afforded by HTML has no value beyond what can be
done in plain text.
4. The cost of bandwidth will remain fixed at 1992 levels.
While I’m not a huge fan of the various forms of rich text for most emails, I do acknowledge that they do sometimes have merit and that in those cases, having a plain-text alternative included in the message for backwards compatibility with less capable or automated email consumers is, IMHO, preferable to not having it and consumes very little bandwidth by today’s standards.
Owen
Whenever someone has a "experience" while reading an e-mail message or viewing a web page, one has to wonder what sort of drugs they are on ... It is the LSD that provides the "experience", not whether you are viewing an e-mail message or a web-page-over-SMTP ...
Please experience the wonders of the top-quote. See your local psychedelic distributor if you are somehow not "experiencing" anything ...
I experience a savings in time with non-edited top quoting. If I don't
see meaningful new content within the first 20 lines, I ignore it as
worthless...unless it's a topic I'm following closely.
And, yes, I use a text-only mail reader. I don't like HTML mail,
because it's an attack vector for ne'er-do-wells. As long as the mail
reader allows "self-clicking" URLs, just NO.
+1
I'd like to go on record as saying that I PREFER top-posting.
Why dig through what you've already read to see the new comments?
Actually in an ideal world previous included bits would be links which
could optionally be expanded via one shared remote copy but lo I
wander.
You should try some of the internet governance (I know, oxymoron)
lists where people will inline a megabyte of discussion to add just
"+1!" or "I agree!" or "congrats!" in the middle or bottom. It's like
Alice's Restaurant.
"The purpose of time is to prevent everything from happening at once"
Somehow that seems to apply to this.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
And now you're sitting here wondering what possible relevance that might have
to some line or other - the only context you have at this point is that it's a
reply to something you wrote. Actually, at this point you don't even have that.
So you may have read this entire thing and now you're still wondering what
possible relevance it may have to the thread.
That would really be nice, but people are inherintly lazy and will
not invest the few seconds to make reading easier.
I know if I see a bunch of quotes I am more inclined to delete the
email than read it. Port 26...
And just imagine what email threading might be like today …
… if early email clients had defaulted to displaying the bottom of the thread (as if you’d scrolled there).
Thoughtful UX design matters.
Why must there be a hard rule about top posting?
If the replied to message(s) comprise a long logical sequence, the OCD among us experience cognitive dissonance if the order is “un-natural”. Thus bottom posting continues the “natural” sequence and makes life easier for many of us who otherwise would have difficulty maintaining context.
If a quoted message is concise, either by origin or by quoting only a salient point, top posting is not inappropriate. Context is nearby.
If the quoted message asks a series of questions, interspersed answers provide bottom posting on a per question basis which clearly indicates the relation of each reply segment to the appropriate segment. Again, this assists many of us in maintaining context.
If the reply is done from a tiny-screen as on an iPhone, context of long messages is impossible to maintain and, anyway, top posting is the default.
This whole argument is analogous to rigorously not aligning braces in C code because Ritchie did it. Or rigorously aligning braces in C code to make comprehending easier.
This reply is deliberately top posted with the reference material as a short appendix. It is in plain text so rendering has no browser dependancies and the archived version remains readable.
I'd like to go on record as saying that I PREFER top-posting.
To each his / her own preference.
Why dig through what you've already read to see the new comments?
So that the comments are in context (item followed by comment about item) of what they are about.
Actually in an ideal world previous included bits would be links which could optionally be expanded…
Well formatted text can be expanded and collapsed with proper MUA plugins.
This means that a long inline message can be viewed as one (collapsed) line of quoted text followed by multiple lines of reply. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary.
…via one shared remote copy but lo I wander.
That's a nice idea. But you start to get into even more complications. Many of which are related to security and capability to access central shared copy. Such isn't possible with email accessed via UUCP sneaker net, where as quoted text is. 
You should try some of the internet governance (I know, oxymoron) lists where people will inline a megabyte of discussion to add just "+1!" or "I agree!" or "congrats!" in the middle or bottom.
Arguably the fact that they have done that is in and of itself an abuse, specifically around the quote to new content ratio.
If you use quote collapsing, then it would appear as one line followed by the reactionary response with the possibility of one line below.
A couple of analogies:
How well do you think a teacher would respond if a student stapled a sheet of paper with their answers to all the questions without numbers to the top of the quiz with room to answer the questions in line?
How would you like to receive edits / comments / suggestions to a paper that you wrote as one lump at the top or bottom without any reference to page / paragraph / sentence / word that the comment is about?
Both of these methods do technically provide the answer to the questions. But they impart much more load on the recipient to identify and / or locate the relevant section that they are in response to.
Conversely, if Question and Answer documents are in multiple sets of that order, Question followed by Answer, it's quite easy to find associated items.
Finally, set the example that you want others to follow.