Bottom posting v top posting

[Florian Gamböck]

On 2018-05-17 13:15, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> On 13May2018 19:53, Florian Gamböck <ml at floga.de> wrote:
>> To further avoid confusion I make sure to always insert one blank, 
>> unquoted line between the quote and my reply. So even if someone uses 
>> a client that HTML formats blockquotes with vertical lines on the 
>> left, there is always the indicator in form of a vertical gap so my 
>> reply will not easily being overlooked.
>
> Yes, this is important. Not just for courtesy and etxt clarity, but 
> also for how other mailers treat the reply.
>
> I've also seen replies come back from people unused to inline response 
> with their reply slap in the middle of the quoted text because they've 
> not added a blank line. I don't know exactly what's happening at their 
> end, but at my end they text appears in the middle of the quoted 
> prose. I should dig into it.

You are right, this can be quite annoying, but it is not necessary that 
those people are not used to inline reply, it is rather that their 
e-mail client might display the reply in a poor way.

When I was using Thunderbird a few years ago, if I composed an e-mail 
with inline reply, then above and beneath my reply, there always was a 
clearly visible gap. However, this gap was only visible in the compose 
window. When looking at the email afterwards in the reader, my reply 
stuck tightly between the quoted message parts, almost impossible to 
spot if you do not accidently stumble upon it. I then developed two 
habits: First, make double sure that there is a legit blank line above 
and beneath my reply, no matter how absurdly big the gaps looked. 
Second, save the e-mail as draft and take a look at it again in the 
reader pane. I think I do not have to emphasize how long it sometimes 
took for me to write a short e-mail as a response to another one.

So it is not always the fault of the users alone.

--Flo