Top posting in a meandeing thread was: Re: Fedora - time to blink

[les]

On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 11:15 +0100, Reindl Harald wrote:
> 
> Am 28.11.2011 09:12, schrieb les:
> > On Sun, 2011-11-27 at 20:00 +0100, Reindl Harald wrote:
> >> in business-communication top posting and TOFU is normally
> >> because with TOFU you need only the last mail of a conversation
> >> and with the top-posting you need not to scroll and see the whole
> >> answer in the preview after select a message
> >>
> >> so this is all a point of view
> >>
> > But business email is not normally archived for later use.  It is
> > essentially one time communications with a few exceptions.  And this
> > difference is essential between a mailing list and simple email
> > exchanges.
> > Just my 2 cents worth, and that ain't much these days
> 
> where do you work that you are allowed to delete business-communication? :-)
> 
> 
> 

Well, I'm retired now.  But day to day communications about everything
non product related, like submit this report, or check on customer x,
and so on were deleted routinely.  Today, not much is deleted, I know,
from the central servers, but on the users local disk, a lot of the
day-to-day communications is deleted routinely, and would only be looked
at in some larger context, possibly legal, but even in that area, much
of it is just the drivel of how work gets done.  Sometimes it might lead
some legal beagle to some smoking gun, but likely it is just noise.

Additionally the ability to archive huge amounts of communications is a
relatively new capability.  I retired in 2005, and disk space was still
a bit of a premium, and I know there are limits even today.  Many of my
communications with customers contained files of encrypted and/or
compressed data, and a single programs data files could easily exceed 5G
for one version with generally multiple versions.  The data was often
transmitted in several files via EMAIL and sometimes through web portals
with encryption and specific one way accounts.

I am sure those communications, which detailed the progress of programs
and developments are archived somewhere and probably several somewheres.

But by and large, these things have a limited shelf life in the
corporations usage, so the archives were typically TAPE, which was dated
and stored off site.  They were and probably are not designed like a
mailing list archive for instantaneous retrieval and review.  Nor in
most cases is the historical linkage valuable to someone perusing the
work for references.  Likely they are interested in the end product for
reproduction or reuse.  Which is not the same type of use as a mailing
list.

Regards,
Les H