Bottom posting v top posting

[Akkana Peck]

Jon LaBadie writes:
> Another example of this: I typically bottom/in-line
> respond even private emails.  As most of you may
> note I have a lot of personal info in my standard
> signature.  Yet even people with whom I've had many
> exchanges will ask my address or phone number.

Some email clients, like gmail, hide the signature. To check,
I bounced your message to a gmail account I have, and sure enough,
it doesn't show the signature with the phone numbers. But I tried
another message where I deliberately top-posted, then added a
signature with "-- " before the quoted text, and it did show
that one. So it hides a signature if it's just a signature, but
shows it if there's quoted text after it (at least in my extensive
test of 2 samples and one webmail client).

But I agree most top-posters never read the quoted text even when
their mail client shows it to them. All that quoting is a complete
silly waste of space and bandwidth, except in one very special edge
case: the "You weren't CCed on this discussion, but you should have
been, adding you in now" case.

        ...Akkana