Net Etiquette 6: Enclosing the full text of an e-mail when replying to it

This follows on from 5 posts I did back in April on net etiquette:

1. Click HERE
2. Blank Subject Lines
3. Use the BCC Field
4. ALL CAPITAL LETTERS
5. Fwd: >>Forwarding e-mails

Here's number 6.

When you reply to an e-mail, most e-mail software leaves you the option of including the text of the e-mail to which you are replying.

This is a good thing. It gives the person receiving your reply some context.

But, by the time the e-mail goes back and forth a fair bit, you end up with a great long trail of replies to replies to replies. By this stage, the e-mail has reached several hundred kilobytes, even though it is just plain text, and the page is full of ">" and ">>" and ">>>>>" signs.

This is bad etiquette for several reasons:

• It fills up the mailboxes of your recipients. 10 e-mails, each of about 100kb, is quite a bit of bloat
• It makes the e-mail hard to read, especially if your most recent reply is either at the bottom or peppered throughout the discourse. A reader has to track through looking for the lines that contain no ">" signs. By the time your e-mail has been replied to twice, a reader has to track through, looking for the lines that contain exactly two ">" signs, and no more.
• Those folk who have e-mail software set to only download the headers if an e-mail is bigger than a certain size (which is a good setting in certain settings, especially if your internet connection is a mobile one), have to download each e-mail twice
• Some people are allergic to e-mails like this. Please, if you must send an e-mail like this, include the warning at the top of all your e-mails: "Caution. This e-mail was prepared on a computer that also processes nuts." People choke on these things, you know.

I'm grateful to the friends who have pointed this latest piece of net etiquette out to me — I missed it when I did my first 5 posts because I hadn't thought of it. There is no objective, acultural standard for bad etiquette. Rather, if a habit leads to genuine irritation, inconvenience or wasting time for other members of a society, it becomes an item of manners.

I'm sure there'll be net etiquette items 7ff as well, in due course!