For example I’ll send an e-mail with 3 questions and will only get an answer to one of the questions. It’s worse when there are 2 yes/no questions with a question that is obviously not a yes/no question. Then I get a response of

Yes

back in the e-mail. So which question are they answering?

Mainly I’m asking all of you why do people insist on only answering 1 question out of an e-mail where there are multiple? Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?

Edit at this point I’ve got the answers . Some are too lazy to actually read. Some admit they get focused on one item and forget to go back. I understand the second group. The first group yeah no excuse there.

Continuing edit: there are comments where people have tried the bullet points and they say it still doesn’t help. I might put the needed questions in red.

  • mavu@discuss.tchncs.de
    564·
    3 days ago

    I KNOW THIS ONE AND THE ANSWER IS : IT"S MICROSOFT’S FAULT.

    Back in the day when Email first became popular, it was normal and accepted use to do “in-line-quoting”. You would hit “reply” and get the text of the original mail with a quote character, mostly “>” in the begining of the line. Then you would put some empty lines at the point where you wanted to answer/comment and type your reply in the middle of the email you received, easily giving context to your words, and making it obvious to what this comment relates, while also showing which part was by the sender and which by you (due to the quotation symbols)

    This was a very good system, and then came MICROSOFT OUTLOOK

    and they defaulted to giving you a empty page when clicking reply and just dumping the whole mail you replied to somewhere below, out of sight.

    everyone using Outlook started “top-posting” to the annoyance of every intelligent being in the galaxy, but because Outlook was the first email experience many people had, the culture of in-line-quoting was destroyed by the unwashed microsoft masses.

    fast-forward to today, where a young person (that is below 50) posts about a topic just to vent, and a old person (over 9000) replies with a sincere history lessen from a time where even email were better.

    yours truely,

    someone who is still salty about that and just decided to make a youtube rant about it.

      • mavu@discuss.tchncs.de
        3·
        3 days ago

        I said I **will **make one, and as soon as I **did ** i will post the link (*)

        (*) as a person with ADHD, the chances of both those things happening before the heat death of the universe indistinguishable from zero.

      • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
        72·
        3 days ago

        They probably didn’t link it by default because of Rule 4. However, I think there should be an exception when other users ask for links. (Maybe the rule should be, “No unsolicited self promotion”?)

        For the record, I would also like to see this rant.

    • bss03@infosec.pubEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      It reverses the natural flow of the conversation.

      Why is top-posting so bad?

      Top-posting.

      What’s the worst thing I can do when writing a reply to the mailing list?

    • octobob@lemmy.ml
      6·
      3 days ago

      I’m a younger person (32) and didn’t know about this norm until I saw an older person doing it. Now I do it as well but make it obvious what the intent is.

      For example:

      Hello (person),

      See responses below in red

      Blah blah blah original email text

      Red text

      Blah blah blah

      Red text

      Etc.

      It works really well. Said person will even respond in green to my red. We do all this in new outlook, which to be fair, is still a mess for other reasons. Don’t even get me started on the search lol

    • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I dont use ms products, but I can’t believe that’s the default. Very rarely does someone reply to me without the message quoted. And most still quote lines manually with >

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      42·
      3 days ago

      Honestly, what I would like and I’ve never seen is a 2-pane reply window; left side is the reply, blank, and the right side is the previous emal. Both panes are scrollable, and if you highlight something on the right side, there’s a <— button in between that lets you shoot that text to the reply pane as a quote then continue composing as usual.

      That might be nice for replies on social media like this, too.