Bottom posting v top posting

Akkana Peck akkana at shallowsky.com
Thu May 17 00:01:42 UTC 2018


tech-lists writes:
> But inline quoting has its own issues. Multiple inline quotes from multiple
> messages can get messy. IMOHO messier than just bottom posting, which is at
> least logically chronological.

Agreed -- sometimes I wish there was a flag to differentiate the
"> " characters somehow. But I'm not quite sure how I'd want it
to work; sometimes I edit them to use initial(s) of the person
being quoted, like "M>" or "MT>", but most of the time it
doesn't seem necessary.

Martin Trautmann writes:
> Who would do inline quoting from multiple messages? That would be
> absurd, since replying to multiple messages with proper threading would
> be to reply to those messages separately.

I do that, by marking and using ;r. For instance, this message.
Seems fairly clear to me; I don't see the problem. Being able to
do this so easily is one of the reasons I love mutt.

Of course, in this case I could have simply replied to your message
and let tech-lists' quote be >>, but what if you hadn't quoted the
relevant part of the earlier message? You'd really prefer to make
several separate related replies one right after the other on the
same topic, rather than one reply with all your comments?

Sure, a threaded view will have to choose only one of the messages
being replied to, but it's hard to see that as a major problem.
A lot of mailers don't even follow the references and just group
everything with the same subject into one thread, so it's not
like most people scrutinize the details of the thread tree.

        ...Akkana


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