Bottom posting v top posting

[Patrick Shanahan]

* Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> [05-13-18 10:35]:
> Brian Salter-Duke writes:
> > My partner reads gmail on her phone or tablet. [ ... ]
> > If I had bottom posting, she would never have read my message, thinking
> > that some how she had got her email back again.
> 
> If that's true, you're not trimming enough. The idea isn't to quote
> the other person's entire message and put your reply underneath --
> that's annoying on any platform, not just on phones. The idea is to
> quote a few lines of context before your reply, and remove the rest.
> If someone wants to read the entire previous message, they can use
> the list archive.
> 
> In a later message, Brian Salter-Duke writes (after 32 lines of
> two levels of unedited quoted material):
> > We have had 20 years or so to educate people to bottom post. We have almost
> > entirely failed.
> 
> That failed because a few companies that provided the email software
> for a high proportion of users, notably Google and Microsoft,
> opted to configure their mail software to add a blank line at the
> top of the message, thus implying people should put their reply there.
> Users took the hint, and that was when everybody started switching
> to top-posting. It wasn't nearly as common before the Gmail default
> changed; I think Outlook's default had changed quite a bit earlier,
> and corporate users had been top-posting for quite a while, but it
> wasn't that common for ordinary users or mailing lists until Gmail
> changed.
> 
> If everybody used mutt, the top-posting scourge wouldn't have
> happened. :-)

I really believe it (top-posting, full quoting) began with compuserve and
aol, really discouraging time in history.

-- 
(paka)Patrick Shanahan       Plainfield, Indiana, USA          @ptilopteri
http://en.opensuse.org    openSUSE Community Member    facebook/ptilopteri
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