Do you feel drowning in useless emails that are are to follow ? Search no more, simply blame the “my replies are below”. Let’s see how you can improve the situation.

Why inline is harmful

In the old days, it was very impolite to top-post when replying. The better way was to reply inline the conversation, quoting what you replied to. With the advent of formatted emails, quoting became much harder, and people starting to top post a “my replies are below” followed by a edition of the original email with red additions. That’s horrible, let’s see how can do better.

Such inline reply is bad because it is cheap for the writer, but expensive for the reader. This perfectly aligns with the modern times where everyone tries to produce as much content as possible for the minimal effort. All in name of so-called “efficiency”, usually coupled with adding as much recipients to the email reply as possible.

Yet, it is a very short-sighted, and very damaging, behavior. For each email, it puts some extra workload on each and every recipient of that email. That, either slows down the whole organisation or leads to the organisation to simply ignore email. The latter leading to even more recipients added to the chain.

Starting to ignore emails begins the death spiral of organisational communications.

Why hard to read ?

It looks innocuous at first, but those inline replies are typically done on lenghty emails with focused replies. Therefore in order to know the answer, one has to fully read the whole email again and spot the replies.

This obviously takes more times than just reading the replies if they were carefully extracted like the old times.

Here is the inline reply style:

My replies are below in red.

Bob

—–Original Message—–
From: Alice alice@example.com
Sent: jeudi 17 avril 2025 16:14
To: Bob bob@example.com
Subject: A Very Lengthy Email

Hello,

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent pellentesque purus id odio egestas rutrum. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae; Suspendisse egestas lacus mauris, vel cursus nunc efficitur non. Proin ut metus varius, congue nunc ac, tristique dui. Nam placerat, enim eget congue placerat, nibh velit aliquet ex, eget iaculis mauris nunc vel neque. Pellentesque

Sed sollicitudin urna vitae dictum.

urna dui, commodo vitae bibendum quis, bibendum efficitur libero. Aenean aliquet justo vel tempus gravida. Integer ornare egestas sem nec vestibulum. Aenean est est, vestibulum sit amet quam semper, feugiat venenatis mi. Suspendisse ut risus lorem. Nam urna ex, euismod non lorem id, elementum tristique sem.

Nunc porttitor et orci et pulvinar. Nunc quis pretium tortor. Maecenas ullamcorper enim turpis, sodales accumsan nisi posuere sit amet. Aliquam erat volutpat. Vivamus ultrices ac diam vel rutrum. Vivamus bibendum, eros eget volutpat lobortis, mauris nibh sollicitudin augue, vel accumsan ipsum ante et mauris. Mauris vel orci mi. Suspendisse nec ex ut odio lacinia imperdiet nec in arcu. Nulla dignissim nibh vel faucibus posuere. Phasellus congue, nibh non tempus placerat, tortor turpis finibus neque, a tempus nisl enim eget eros. Integer tincidunt orci vitae elit feugiat, non vehicula eros lobortis. Nulla sagittis gravida turpis, pharetra efficitur sapien feugiat sed. Mauris egestas rutrum turpis id posuere. Maecenas porta suscipit ornare.

Integer porttitor quam sit amet.

Praesent consequat, ex nec aliquet cursus, purus purus dignissim diam, eget consectetur ligula sem eu sem. Donec semper mi eget ligula porttitor laoreet. Vestibulum laoreet dapibus consequat. Etiam eget nisi congue, consequat ante dictum, lacinia nibh. Maecenas mattis massa mauris, vel egestas nisi tempor at. Morbi bibendum et lacus nec suscipit. Quisque ac dignissim mauris. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. In bibendum ligula eget ipsum dictum ultrices.

This does not look so bad, but what happens when several actors have contributed several times ?

My replies are marked (CH).

Charles

—–Original Message—–
From: Alice alice@example.com
To: Bob bob@example.com
Cc: Charles charles@example.com
Subject: Re: Re: A Very Lengthy Email

My replies are below in blue. Added Charles for review.

Alice

—–Original Message—–
From: Bob bob@example.com
To: Alice alice@example.com
Subject: Re: A Very Lengthy Email

My replies are below in red.

Bob

—–Original Message—–
From: Alice alice@example.com
To: Bob bob@example.com
Subject: A Very Lengthy Email

Hello,

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Urna dui, commodo vitae bibendum quis, bibendum efficitur libero. Aenean aliquet justo vel tempus gravida. Integer ornare egestas sem nec vestibulum. Aenean est est, vestibulum sit amet quam semper, feugiat venenatis mi. Suspendisse ut risus lorem. Nam urna ex, euismod non lorem id, elementum tristique sem.

Integer porttitor quam sit amet.

Ut ultrices, orci sagittis tempor ornare, diam.

(CH) Sed eu ante.

You immediatly see the issue, it becomes an untangled mess for the average person to understand.

Now, add colorblind personel as Charles is, you need to avoid color coding and start prefixing with the initials. But that doesn’t solve the issue of multiple replies of the same person.

And if you add blind personel to the mix, which need to resort to screen readers, you’ll just made their life totally impossible.

Top quoting to the rescue

I agree that one advantage when inline replying is that the whole email is preserved. This enables late participants to understand the context much more than having only excerpts.

But you can do both if you take a little more time. Specificially quote what you want to reply to in the top of the reply, and leave the whole original email fully untouched underneath. That way you help the reader to focus on what’s important. Yet leaving the full converstation context intact.

Let’s see how that last email would look like

Sed sollicitudin urna vitae dictum.

Ut ultrices, orci sagittis tempor ornare, diam.

Sed eu ante.

Charles

—–Original Message—–
From: Alice alice@example.com
To: Bob bob@example.com
Cc: Charles charles@example.com
Subject: Re: Re: A Very Lengthy Email

Sed sollicitudin urna vitae dictum.

Ut ultrices, orci sagittis tempor ornare, diam.

Added Charles for review.

Alice

—–Original Message—–
From: Bob bob@example.com
To: Alice alice@example.com
Subject: Re: A Very Lengthy Email

Proin ut metus varius, congue nunc ac, tristique dui. Nam placerat, enim eget congue placerat, nibh velit aliquet ex, eget iaculis mauris nunc vel neque. Pellentesque

Sed sollicitudin urna vitae dictum.

Vivamus ultrices ac diam vel rutrum. Vivamus bibendum, eros eget volutpat lobortis, mauris nibh sollicitudin augue, vel accumsan ipsum ante et mauris

Integer porttitor quam sit amet.

Bob

—–Original Message—–
From: Alice alice@example.com
To: Bob bob@example.com
Subject: A Very Lengthy Email

Hello,

Any reader can now stop at the first —–Original Message—– knowing that they already have read it, and continue if they didn’t.

This is much better, as the reader now immediatly see what’s going on. And still has quick access to the full context.

Another side-effect of top-quoting is that taking that extra time to fine select the quote is very useful in avoiding misunderstandings. As you’ll need to read carefully the message that was sent to you. Which is very valuable to the writers.

Call to Action

To improve your emails, start to top-quote. It will take a little more of your time, but it is totally worth it. You’ll make your readers happier and your replies will be much more accurate.

And, of course, when asked why, just redirect everyone to that page 😉

Why inline is harmful

Why hard to read ?

Top quoting to the rescue

Call to Action

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