Bottom posting v top posting

[Will Yardley]

I'll be honest, I really don't spend a lot of time thinking about this
subject these days. It's rare that I need to spend much time on
technical mailing lists and USENET -- so much discussion has moved to
online forums, Slack communities, and so forth.

With friends, family, and work, I find that I use email less and less,
between text messaging, Slack, etc. While I still trim quoted material
and reply inline (even when using IOS's mail application vs. Mutt /vim),
I don't expect others to do so.

I do think it's fair to understand that, while for technical mailing
lists and newsgroups, our way of quoting is "correct", that the
conventions are very different in the business world, so it's not really
surprising that many people don't quote emails this way, or find it
confusing when others do. At some point, being prescriptive only takes
you so far; at this point, we are so far out of the majority that it's
not evey funny.

As far as the situation where someone else doesn't see that I even
replied, because of the amount of initial quoted material, that isn't a
situation that's really come up for me yet, but I could imagine it
happening.

w