Bottom posting v top posting

[Stefan Hagen]

Brian Salter-Duke wrote:
> Erik Christiansen wrote:
>> Salter-Duke wrote:
>>> My partner reads gmail on her phone or tablet. She reads my messages but
>>> does not realise that if she scrolls down she can see her message that
>>> I replying to. If I had bottom posting, she would never have read my
>>> message, thinking that some how she had got her email back again. The use
>>> of phones for email alters the game. It is time we gave up bottom posting!
>>
>> Thinking can be a useful path to learning. Is it possible for you to
>> imagine that if you could learn to trim your quotes to the essential
>> minimum of a line or two, then bottom posting works well on most screens,
>> and even on phones if you prefix the whole message with: "For clarity I'm
>> answering in context, see below:"
>
> Eric, I tried to email you direct, but you do not allow that, so I will have
> to send to the list my anger at your post. Who the hell do you think you are
> to lecture me in that way?

This is the kind of response I get from some of my top-posting friends as 
well. I've stopped that debate in my environment. I like bottom posting and I 
do it everywhere. I put in the extra work to reformat whole email chains and 
sometimes people do not want to break it and continue.

I also use the hated HTML format to force a proper formatting on their 
clients. I generate an HTML part for my email, which represents the text part 
with a fixed width font, a forced width of 82 characters and colored quote 
lines. Now I can use ASCII drawings and all my friends on their fancy phones
and crappy clients can enjoy it.

I often get compliments on the style and readability on my emails. And my 
response then is: Use a proper client and learn about email and every mail 
will look like this.

HTML is not allowed on this list, so here is the HTML part for this mail:
https://shell.srv.hagen.coffee/~sdk/textmail.html

Best Regards,
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Hagen
Phone: +49 (0)176 642 925 17
Defender of RFC 1855 | PGP Key in Header.