Bottom posting v top posting

[Florian Gamböck]

basically, people quote back way too much. This is the issue. Most
email apps allow threaded mail, so very little need to quote whole
screeds.

My rule of thumb is usually, I quote as much text as is needed so that
my reply makes sense without searching older mails. While you are right
that many mail clients *can* display threaded mail in a nice manner,
definitely not all clients actually *do* so, or are configured so by
default. So I do not make assumptions if my communication partner does
look at the same happy little tree of messages that I am.

I usually won't quote complete paragraphs or even full messages if
possible. But just a single "Do you agree with me?" as a quote from a
pretty long, ongoing conversation is way too less IMHO.

But after all, it all depends on personal preference. If I had an
electronic conversation with someone who said that they get confused by
my way of quoting, then I would respect that and imitate their way.
Maybe after the discussion, or in person if applicable, I would bring it
up again and see if I can at least implant some idea to them, but I have
long given up to convince someone to change their style they use for
years.

[Brian Salter-Duke]

This post might be inappropriate. Click to display it.

[Stefan Hagen]

https://shell.srv.hagen.coffee/~sdk/textmail.html

Do you generate this somehow?

Of course I do.

My mutt configuration is here:
gopher://codevoid.de:70/1/git/dotfiles/files.gph
Or if you don't use gopher, prepend https://codevoid.de/?q=

I use a script as sendmail command (mutt/scripts/sendmail-privat).

This script calls MIMEmbellish (mutt/scripts/MIMEmbellish), which can
transform a text message into a multipart message. It was originally meant to
allow you to write markdown and create the html part with pandoc.

I really dislike the markdown approach, because if forces me to alter the
text part in order to produce proper html. I want to write emails, not source
code.

So instead of pandoc, I wrote htmlize.sh (mutt/scripts/htmlize.sh) and changed
MIMEmbellish to call this instead.

Then I send the result via msmtp.

That's pretty much my setup. I also have a mutt mail syntax file
which contains some formatting magic and a html preview shortcut.
(vim/bundle/vim-mailsyntax/ftplugin/mail.vim)

Best Regards,
Stefan

[Martin Trautmann]

Nooooo!! ;) and you're missing the point (IMOHO) :( basically, people
quote back way too much. This is the issue. Most email apps allow
threaded mail, so very little need to quote whole screeds.

IBTD. Major e-mail tools, such as outlook, failed to support proper threading. Writing on a smartphone here, I'm not even aware of an app with threading.

But are we still discussing bottom vs. top quoting? The here recommended style to me is known as INLINE QUOTING, where you do trim the quoting to the few lines which will help to understand the context of a discussion.

Neither top or bottom are as efficient to me.

- Martin

[Mark H. Wood]

Post by Martin Trautmann

Nooooo!! ;) and you're missing the point (IMOHO) :( basically, people
quote back way too much. This is the issue. Most email apps allow
threaded mail, so very little need to quote whole screeds.

IBTD. Major e-mail tools, such as outlook, failed to support proper threading. Writing on a smartphone here, I'm not even aware of an app with threading.

Heh. When I want to do email via my phone, I SSH to where the mail is
and use Mutt. It works very well, threading and all.

I haven't seen a phone-resident MUA or a webmail thingy that I would
choose to use if I had another way. But a modern phone makes a nice
terminal.
--
Mark H. Wood
Lead Technology Analyst, weirdo

University Library
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
755 W. Michigan Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-0749
www.ulib.iupui.edu

[Ben Oliver]

Post by Mark H. Wood

Post by Martin Trautmann

Nooooo!! ;) and you're missing the point (IMOHO) :( basically, people
quote back way too much. This is the issue. Most email apps allow
threaded mail, so very little need to quote whole screeds.

IBTD. Major e-mail tools, such as outlook, failed to support proper threading. Writing on a smartphone here, I'm not even aware of an app with threading.

Heh. When I want to do email via my phone, I SSH to where the mail is
and use Mutt. It works very well, threading and all.
I haven't seen a phone-resident MUA or a webmail thingy that I would
choose to use if I had another way. But a modern phone makes a nice
terminal.

This is a cool idea. I use K9 which has decent threading support. Mainly
for reading rather than sending though.

[Martin Trautmann]

Post by Ben Oliver
This is a cool idea. I use K9 which has decent threading support. Mainly
for reading rather than sending though.

Could you send me a screenshot please? I also do use k9, but I only do see a grouping by subject. It lacks a hierarchical tree view.

Ssh for mutt is an interesting idea, although I have no clue how I would use vi on a smartphone for composing a reply
.

- Martin

[Matthias Apitz]

Post by Martin Trautmann

Post by Ben Oliver
This is a cool idea. I use K9 which has decent threading support. Mainly
for reading rather than sending though.

Could you send me a screenshot please? I also do use k9, but I only do see a grouping by subject. It lacks a hierarchical tree view.
Ssh for mutt is an interesting idea, although I have no clue how I would use vi on a smartphone for composing a reply
.

I have as smartphone a BQ E4.5 which comes with an Ubuntu Linux. The
normal GUI MUA is Dekko, but I have ported mutt to the device and can
read/write and send e-mail written with vim. Anybody wants some screen?

matthias

[Cameron Simpson]

Post by Mark H. Wood
I haven't seen a phone-resident MUA or a webmail thingy that I would
choose to use if I had another way. But a modern phone makes a nice
terminal.

What do you do about typing? I pretty much don't use my phone for email at all,
largely because the typing experience is so awful. If there are things I could
do to improve that I'd love to hear about them.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <***@cskk.id.au>

[tech-lists]

Post by Martin Trautmann
IBTD. Major e-mail tools, such as outlook, failed to support proper threading. Writing on a smartphone here, I'm not even aware of an app with threading.

You're using K-9 mail which has apparently supported threading since
4.390-beta, see
http://grokbase.com/t/gg/k-9-mail/135pt36a12/conversation-threaded-view/oldest

I must admit that I don't know of an MUA that does not have threading
capability in 2018. But I know nothing about outlook.

Post by Martin Trautmann
But are we still discussing bottom vs. top quoting? The here recommended style to me is known as INLINE QUOTING, where you do trim the quoting to the few lines which will help to understand the context of a discussion.

Personally, if I need to quote someone back to themselves, I'll do it inline.

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.

[Stephan Seitz]

Post by tech-lists
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.

Bottom posting is as bad as top posting. There isn’t much difference.
Bigger mail with several questions is difficult to answer with both
methods. In most cases some questions are missed or the recipient doesn’t
know to which question the answer belongs.

Inline quoting is the only good method. It forces the writer to think
about his answers and the correct placement so that the recipient doesn’t
have trouble to understand the mail and this should be the most important
thing.

Shade and sweet water!

Stephan

[Martin Trautmann]

Post by Stephan Seitz
Bottom posting is as bad as top posting. There isn’t much difference.

I fully agree. Using fullquotes it does not matter very much whether you
do it at top or bottom. Both is stupid for replies and even worse on
mailing lists where everyone should know about all the former messages.

There's just one occasion where private messages would require a
fullquote: when you do give a message to someone who does not know the
former messages.

But for this purpose there is a definition of its own: this would be a
*forwarding* instead of a reply.

Schönen Gruß
Martin

[Martin Trautmann]

Post by tech-lists

Post by Martin Trautmann
IBTD. Major e-mail tools, such as outlook, failed to support proper
threading. Writing on a smartphone here, I'm not even aware of an app
with threading.

You're using K-9 mail which has apparently supported threading since
4.390-beta, see
http://grokbase.com/t/gg/k-9-mail/135pt36a12/conversation-threaded-view/oldest

Strange - I do use 5.403. This version offers "Nachrichten gruppieren":
Nachrichten eines Diskussionsstranges zusammenfassen. ("group messages
by subject).

This is exactly at this setting position as
<https://k9mail.github.io/documentation/settings/global.html> names as
"Threaded View". But threaded to me is a tree with hierarchy, not just
group messages by subject.

Post by tech-lists
I must admit that I don't know of an MUA that does not have threading
capability in 2018. But I know nothing about outlook.

Please explain what threading meens to you. Thunderbird or mutt support
excellent threading. K-9 here doesn't.

Post by tech-lists

Post by Martin Trautmann
But are we still discussing bottom vs. top quoting? The here
recommended style to me is known as INLINE QUOTING, where you do trim
the quoting to the few lines which will help to understand the context
of a discussion.

Personally, if I need to quote someone back to themselves, I'll do it inline.

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.

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.

- Martin

[Patrick Shanahan]

* Akkana Peck <***@shallowsky.com> [05-16-18 20:03]:
[...]

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.

a big *plus* for mutt, as all mail clients are not created equal(ly). but
mutt is the "head of the class".

not that I am biased after 20+ years, thankyou Mr. Elkins

[Derek Martin]

Post by Martin Trautmann
But are we still discussing bottom vs. top quoting? The here
recommended style to me is known as INLINE QUOTING, where you do
trim the quoting to the few lines which will help to understand the
context of a discussion.

Thank you for making this point. I kept reading the thread waiting
for someone to make it before I piped up to make it myself. Bottom
posting is just as loathesome as top posting. This community prefers
inline responses, the key being what several people have pointed out:
The quoted text is trimmed judiciously to include only enough of what
was previously said to provide adequate context, with responses in
line after the relevant quoted snippet..

[Cameron Simpson]

Post by Martin Trautmann

Nooooo!! ;) and you're missing the point (IMOHO) :( basically, people
quote back way too much. This is the issue. Most email apps allow
threaded mail, so very little need to quote whole screeds.

IBTD. Major e-mail tools, such as outlook, failed to support proper threading. Writing on a smartphone here, I'm not even aware of an app with threading.

The Apple iOS mail client threads. As is their habit when they roll out a new
feature, they turned it on by default. Which should be good for feature
discovery, but made my partner complain that the threading, such as it was, was
gone because they threads were now collapsed, with an icon for expansion.

Post by Martin Trautmann
But are we still discussing bottom vs. top quoting? The here recommended style to me is known as INLINE QUOTING, where you do trim the quoting to the few lines which will help to understand the context of a discussion.

Yes. I suspect calling inline reply bottom posting misleads many many top
posters to think "why would you put your reply below an infinite of quoted
text?"

Post by Martin Trautmann
Neither top or bottom are as efficient to me.

Indeed.

I try to use the metaphor "so that your reply reads like a conversation" when I
try to convince people.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <***@cskk.id.au>

[Francesco Ariis]

We have had 20 years or so to educate people to bottom post. We have almost
entirely failed.

Judging by the message you are replying to, we failed but we did not
stop being smug prats.

[Ian Zimmerman]

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
Posting to this list yesterday and a recent incident with my partner,
prompts me to raise the issue of bottom posting. For a long time,
mutters have fought battles and wars to get everybody to bottom
post. It makes a lot of sense, but we have lost every battle and every
war. I now only bottom post to emails on this list. I also never ever
see bottom posting in all the hundreds of emails I get every week,
other than posts to the mutt lists.

I am on some 30+ lists, and I'd estimate bottom posting is the norm on
25. It is true that gmail users are a small minority on all of them.

I also bottom post with some of my best friends who _are_ gmail users,
and they don't object. But I think they use computers for email, not
phones.

To sum up, the vision you have of almost everybody using phones may be
the future, but is not yet the present, and I resist accelerating the
transition.

[Jude DaShiell]

Date: Sat, 12 May 2018 23:23:45
Subject: Re: Bottom posting v top posting

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
Posting to this list yesterday and a recent incident with my partner,
prompts me to raise the issue of bottom posting. For a long time,
mutters have fought battles and wars to get everybody to bottom
post. It makes a lot of sense, but we have lost every battle and every
war. I now only bottom post to emails on this list. I also never ever
see bottom posting in all the hundreds of emails I get every week,
other than posts to the mutt lists.

I am on some 30+ lists, and I'd estimate bottom posting is the norm on
25. It is true that gmail users are a small minority on all of them.
I also bottom post with some of my best friends who _are_ gmail users,
and they don't object. But I think they use computers for email, not
phones.
To sum up, the vision you have of almost everybody using phones may be
the future, but is not yet the present, and I resist accelerating the
transition.

[Ian Zimmerman]

Post by Jude DaShiell
Has mutt got something that can be added to a .muttrc file which
positions the cursor in a reply automatically for bottom posting?
With bottom posting what has me concerned is did I hit the downarrow
key enough to get to the correct position for writing and it would be
nice not to have to do that any more.

I use Emacs as an external editor, and it's easy to set this up in
Emacs.

BTW, your post was misformatted: your entire reply appeared as the
signature. Maybe because you scrolled down a line too far :-P

[Brian Salter-Duke]

Post by Ian Zimmerman

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
Posting to this list yesterday and a recent incident with my partner,
prompts me to raise the issue of bottom posting. For a long time,
mutters have fought battles and wars to get everybody to bottom
post. It makes a lot of sense, but we have lost every battle and every
war. I now only bottom post to emails on this list. I also never ever
see bottom posting in all the hundreds of emails I get every week,
other than posts to the mutt lists.

I am on some 30+ lists, and I'd estimate bottom posting is the norm on
25. It is true that gmail users are a small minority on all of them.

Your post encouraged to actually get some figures of the lists I am on. I found
8 lists, not including the mutt list. Only one, a linux users group, used
bottom posting. The other 7 are 6 lists for specific computational chemistry
programs or issues, and one list related to a wikipedia group, so the people
using them are tech savvy. All 7 use top posting.

Post by Ian Zimmerman
I also bottom post with some of my best friends who _are_ gmail users,
and they don't object. But I think they use computers for email, not
phones.

I think my two sons and two daughters would understand bottom posting, but they
would not be convinced. I think all my friends and other relatives would wonder
what I am talking about.

Post by Ian Zimmerman
To sum up, the vision you have of almost everybody using phones may be
the future, but is not yet the present, and I resist accelerating the
transition.

I have some sympathy with you here, but the wide use of phones is having an
impact. I read a study the other day about wikipedia. It seems that the number
of people editing pages has deceased and part of this seems to be because more
people are reading wikipedia on phones not computers and it is much harder to
edit wikipedia on a phone than on a computer.

Brian.

[Scott Kostyshak]

Post by Ian Zimmerman
I also bottom post with some of my best friends who _are_ gmail users,
and they don't object.

+1

The key, I've learned, is to teach them about bottom-posting. I have
occassionally used bottom-posting with contacts without warning, and
that has led to some confusion. I now try to remember to put "see my
responses in-line below" as the first line of the message. Some mail
clients by default collapse inline responses. I don't know which mail
clients they are, but contacts have told me that they just saw an empty
email (until I told them to search for how to uncollapse the quoted
reply). To me, this is a clear bug in such mail clients, but it's good
to know the behavior exists.

I think the important thing is to be kind and patient with newcommers,
and educate them on why in some situations some people prefer
bottom-posting.

I do not participate on this list much, but on lyx-users bottom-posting
is part of our "list netiquette" [1]. If I see a user who is sticking
around for a while, I just kindly remind them that it is part of our
list netiquette. If everyone takes turns in patiently reminding
newcommers, it is not so much of a hastle and I've found that the
newcommers are open to bottom-posting.

Scott

[1] https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=3Dhttps-3A__wiki.lyx.org_FAQ=
_ListNetiquette&d=3DDwIBAg&c=3DpZJPUDQ3SB9JplYbifm4nt2lEVG5pWx2KikqINpWlZM&=
r=3DzUqJVM3RY5svAe6ctaxqyrj3k9OQkcL6UzDF3Kn6e0s&m=3DI0V31ciCHXrUy7R-bTo1iUQ=
7IQ-O4anaqqzxuRkujCM&s=3Dl3XyQq-DSjJT-wVddDp5jQhsRavz1QC53Zxx3JUIpqQ&e=3D


--=20
Scott Kostyshak
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Florida
https://people.clas.ufl.edu/skostyshak/

[Chris Green]

Post by Scott Kostyshak

Post by Ian Zimmerman
I also bottom post with some of my best friends who _are_ gmail users,
and they don't object.

+1

So do I with family and friends.

Post by Scott Kostyshak
The key, I've learned, is to teach them about bottom-posting. I have
occassionally used bottom-posting with contacts without warning, and
that has led to some confusion. I now try to remember to put "see my
responses in-line below" as the first line of the message.

Yes, I add a line like that sometimes if it's long. However the other
thing to do is to trim/snip heavily so you really do only leave the
required context.

[Derek Martin]

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
It is time we gave up bottom posting!

Just... nope.

[Patrick Shanahan]

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

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.

[Ben Oliver]

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

Definitely makes no sense other than 'gmail does it' or 'outlook does
it'

[José María Mateos]

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
Posting to this list yesterday and a recent incident with my partner,
prompts me to raise the issue of bottom posting. For a long time, mutters
have fought battles and wars to get everybody to bottom post. It makes a lot
of sense, but we have lost every battle and every war. I now only bottom
post to emails on this list. I also never ever see bottom posting in all the
hundreds of emails I get every week, other than posts to the mutt lists.

I don't think it's only mutters who do this. I participate in a bunch of
mailing lists, and in the technical ones (essentially: Python, R,
sqlite) people respect the bottom-post, trim reply, no HTML "classical"
netiquette instructions. On others, people just top-post happily; on one
of those lists, I checked yesterday out of curiosity, the last e-mail in
a chain of replies contained one new line and the entire message was 45K
in size. This [1] is 65K, in comparison.

Gmail is quickly becoming Hotmail.

Even on those lists, I bottom-post. I edit what I am replying to and
answer paragraph by paragraph if necessary. I don't do it out of "this
is how things should be done", but because I think it helps getting my
point across. It's good writing. So far, nobody has complained.

This I do with my personal e-mail. At the work, where everybody uses
Outlook and top-posting is the norm, I just go with the flow. But the
purposes of sending an e-mail there and sending an e-mail here are
different.

Cheers,

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17192/pg17192.txt

[Ben Oliver]

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
Posting to this list yesterday and a recent incident with my partner,
prompts me to raise the issue of bottom posting. For a long time, mutters
have fought battles and wars to get everybody to bottom post. It makes a lot
of sense, but we have lost every battle and every war. I now only bottom
post to emails on this list. I also never ever see bottom posting in all the
hundreds of emails I get every week, other than posts to the mutt lists.

I am on lists for almost every bit of software I use and the standard is
definitely to bottom post.

One of my pet peeves however is people who reply to emails with just
'bottom post please' without providing any actual help.

That said it is the only way to go and I just do it everywhere
regardless of what the other person is doing.

The only exception is on those support emails where it says 'please post
your reply above this line'

[Chris Green]

Post by Ben Oliver
The only exception is on those support emails where it says 'please post
your reply above this line'

I just move the line (or copy what's below it to above it) so that I
can reply in context as normal.

[Erik Christiansen]

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
It is time we gave up bottom posting!

...

Eric, I tried to email you direct, but you do not allow that, so I will have to
send to the list my anger at your post.

Please understand that I would have returned it to the list in any event.

Who the hell do you think you are to lecture me in that way?

Anger is good in a dangerous situation, but here it does seem to impede
understanding. From your fulsome fullquote, I have requoted only the
dictatorial challenge in your OP, which caused me to offer up a pin to
the balloon of your fantasy.

I have been using mutt for pretty well as long as you have no doubt. I
am perfectly happy to bottom post. I have always bottom posted on the
mutt lists. I understand why the mutt community prefers it. I prefer it.

No, you have told us we must abandon our optimal practice in favour of
an ignorant fashion. I responded accordingly, in a constructively
educational manner, appropriate to the nature of the challenge.

The problem is that nobody outside the mutt community who email me use it.

A calmer reading of my post ought to reveal that it is an attempt to
help you learn that a difference is not 'a priori' a problem. I write
Danish to my relatives, German to some friends, and English where that
suits. It is no mark of a developed intellect to be so dogmatic as to
insist that various communities must conform to a single norm. If you
think carefully, you will observe that in the sentence above, you
logically connect the problem with the last pronoun there. That is where
you will find the remedy, rather than in attempting to force conformity
on disparate communities.

Also, it would not go down well if I tried to educate my research colleagues
at universities all over the world to bottom post.

On this list we would ask them to do so. As for elsewhere, I refer you
to your sig.

We have had 20 years or so to educate people to bottom post. We have almost
entirely failed.

No we have made no attempt to do so outside lists, but you still fail to
learn to tolerate difference in other communities.

It turns out that my random sig that I use for this list is highly appropriate.
I assure you that it really is random.

Yes it is ironically appropriate. If only you could learn from it what
you have so far failed to learn from gentle prodding of your intellect,
then we would be spared further effort to help you man up and accept
evident difference.

Erik

[Francesco Ariis]

For a long time, mutters have fought battles and wars to get everybody
to bottom post. It makes a lot of sense, but we have lost every battle
and every war.

In a work related environment, top-posting is more common and even
encouraged; it makes sense as sometimes you need to reconstruct the
whole, pristine chain of communication (for audit reasons, to forward
to a third party, etc.).
That, I feel, explains the proneness of many users to top-post.

I now only bottom to emails on this list. I also never ever see bottom
posting in all the hundreds of emails I get every week, other than
posts to the mutt lists.

Bottom-posting on mailing-lists is still a battle worthy of being
fought.
I don't nudge anyone (I do when their email is HTML-only), but I keep
bottom posting on MLs: trimming+BP saves reading time and is clearer.
I hope/expect newcomers to pick out the habit by experiencing how
easier it is to navigate a bottom-posted thread.

[Mark H. Wood]

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
My partner reads gmail on her phone or tablet. She reads my messages but does
not realise that if she scrolls down she can see her message that I replying
to. If I had bottom posting, she would never have read my message, thinking
that some how she had got her email back again. The use of phones for email
alters the game. It is time we gave up bottom posting!

You go right ahead and give it up, if you wish.

I have no interest in coddling people who use tools but can't be
bothered to learn how they work.
--
Mark H. Wood
Lead Technology Analyst

University Library
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
755 W. Michigan Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-0749
www.ulib.iupui.edu

[Brian Salter-Duke]

Post by Mark H. Wood

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
My partner reads gmail on her phone or tablet. She reads my messages but does
not realise that if she scrolls down she can see her message that I replying
to. If I had bottom posting, she would never have read my message, thinking
that some how she had got her email back again. The use of phones for email
alters the game. It is time we gave up bottom posting!

You go right ahead and give it up, if you wish.
I have no interest in coddling people who use tools but can't be
bothered to learn how they work.

That is not the point. I know how mutt works although I am still learning new
things after using it for 20 years or so. Regretably, at 79, I am forgetting
some features I rarely use!!

I have however given up trying to convince people to use bottom posting. I go
with the flow - bottom posting on this list and top posting almost everywhere
else. There is no point continuing to do something which does not work.

[Derek Martin]

Post by Brian Salter-Duke

Post by Mark H. Wood

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
My partner reads gmail on her phone or tablet. She reads my messages but does
not realise that if she scrolls down she can see her message that I replying
to. If I had bottom posting, she would never have read my message, thinking
that some how she had got her email back again. The use of phones for email
alters the game. It is time we gave up bottom posting!

You go right ahead and give it up, if you wish.
I have no interest in coddling people who use tools but can't be
bothered to learn how they work.

That is not the point. I know how mutt works although I am still learning new
things after using it for 20 years or so. Regretably, at 79, I am forgetting
some features I rarely use!!

The way I read this, it's not you, but your partner, that Mark
suggested did not bother to learn how to use the tools she is using.
Which, for what it's worth, is what you told us, basically.

Post by Brian Salter-Duke
I have however given up trying to convince people to use bottom posting. I go
with the flow - bottom posting on this list and top posting almost everywhere
else. There is no point continuing to do something which does not work.

Obviously most of us replying in this thread think that it is top
posting that does not work, as it is confusing and even misleading.
Replying in-line puts your comments after what they refer to, which is
the only way to make sense of any sort of reply to a long message.

[David Young]

You can come back out from under your desk, now. I want to hide under
there. A couple thoughts:

Sometimes I scroll through email conversations on the iPhone---I use
the "next message" button as a last resort. I find that if quotes
are not trimmed, then it does not matter whether they are at the top
or the bottom of an email: there is a lot to scroll through. So when
other iPhone users object to replying under a trimmed reply, I am not
sympathetic.

Do you remember Google Wave? It's been a long time since I watched a
demo, but ISTR you could click where you wanted to insert a reply and
start typing, thus creating an "inline" reply. It looked like they had
thought about the role of quotation in email and made a very thoughtful
design.

It seems to me that an email client should smooth over the differences
between top- and bottom-posting and even merge mails from a thread
into an overview that suppresses the text duplicated by quotations. I
once set out to prototype such a view, but I wasn't too happy with the
way text marched toward the right margin, so I would take a different
approach, today. Here is the conversation I produced an overview for,

http://sigonella.whitecoralislands.com/~dyoung/summary/link-sets.discuss

and here is the overview,

http://sigonella.whitecoralislands.com/~dyoung/summary/summary.html .

If you insist on ASCII art, here is the same overview in text,

http://sigonella.whitecoralislands.com/~dyoung/summary/link-sets.discussion-summary

Dave

[José María Mateos]

Just to add to this thread: by chance, a similar conversation recently
happened on the main Python mailing list. It's also very interesting
reading and starts right here:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2018-May/733194.html

Cheers,

[Derek Martin]

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,

FWIW I don't find this at all... In my experience, there's exactly
*one* justification for the practice that makes any sense at all,
which is the aforementioned adding people to threads, leaving the
whole thread intact for context.

However, in practice, it's also been my experience that those people
still (usually) don't bother to read the quoted thread, and instead
just ask someone for a summary. So it ends up being entirely
pointless regardless.

In the end, I think it's actually about one thing, plain and simple:
laziness.

so it's not really surprising that many people don't quote emails
this way,

It doesn't surprise me, but for the laziness reason, not any reason
related to the conversation content or style. And very often the
response is so terse that you have to ask what was intended, wasting
even more time (since e-mail threads generally are extremely low
bandwidth with large RTT times).

or find it confusing when others do.

YMMV but this too, I find, usually just comes down to laziness. It's
not that they can't understand, they just don't want to be bothered.
Basically any message that contains more than about 3 sentences will
be ignored by a subset of its recipients and require some other means
of communication.

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.

This may be true (and I'm not convinced it is) but that does not in
any way make it less a bad practice. I think ME had it wrong: It's
not that e-mail sucks, it's that the people writing it do. ;-)

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.

Still laziness--on the part of the person who is (or should be) doing
the trimming.

But then, I'm old and stubborn, and you probably expected this sort of
response from me. =8^)

[Thomas Schneider]

Top posting makes complicated scientific conversations with several
interanal threads impossible. "Bottom" posting - which is really
splitting the original email into parts (separated by blank lines for
visual clarity) allows people to hold very complex discussions.

The worst Top Posting case I ever saw occured when my technician
ordered some DNA to be synthesized. Unfortunately the company she
ordered from was in the path of the Rita hurricane and they were
unable to fill the order for some weeks. When they recovered the
sales person top posted a reply to her asking her to send the order
again. It turned out that the bottom of the email contained the
original order. He had sent it back to her!

So Top posters never read further down the email, it's a total waste
of bandwidth.

Also, Top posting makes searches hit the same text multiple times,
making it difficult to find a particular email. If one carefully
trims away all the irrelevant material, leaving just the minimum
necessary then this effect is minimized.

Tom

[Jon LaBadie]

On Sun, May 13, 2018 at 05:43:53PM -0400, Thomas Schneider wrote:
...

Post by Thomas Schneider
So Top posters never read further down the email, it's a total waste
of bandwidth.

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.

Jon

[Akkana Peck]

Post by Jon LaBadie
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

[Don Saklad]

For the current setup at this end here... an attitude of please
feel free replying unconfined.

A few, maybe more than a few contributors to a list and a few maybe more
than a few subscribers reading contributors' writings would allow
contributors the greatest possible freedom for posting style
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Placement_of_replies

Editing/moderating might look for a mechanism, software to automatically
format a particular style, For example http://reddit.com

[Martin Trautmann]

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

Some people try an even more "clever" approach and do reply directly within the quote, applying a different color.

Of course this becomes useless the moment you do reply in plain text, even if you would have been able top see colored html before.

- Martin

[Martin Trautmann]

Am 17. Mai 2018 02:01:42 MESZ schrieb Akkana Peck

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?

Absolutely yes!
Anything else will destroy proper threading.

I would generally agree, but sometimes there are 2 or 3 leaf messages
in a
discussion on the same point, and if you reply all 2 or 3 with one
message you
can (a) post just once instead of further splaying the tree and (b get
a few
closely related or even identical remark togther for comparison and
response.

If they are on the same thing, then why merge them together? Just do reply on only one of them.

I would not look for an answer to my reply within the answer to someone else.

So it is not insane. And most threading clients will associate the
reply with
at least one of the sources, and threading can continue.

I'll have to check this discussion with proper threading at home. Here on the phone it appears to bei severely broken by now.

- Martin

[Cameron Simpson]

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. [... compose habits to mitigate this
...]
So it is not always the fault of the users alone.

The particular user I had this with isn't at fault, but also a nontechnical
user not used to inline reply. And they are using Thunderbird. Your decription
above does sound like a very flawed disconnect between compose and actualy
view. WYSINWYG I guess.

Thank you!

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <***@cskk.id.au>

[Martin Trautmann]

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.

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
The particular user I had this with isn't at fault, but also a
nontechnical
user not used to inline reply. And they are using Thunderbird. Your decription
above does sound like a very flawed disconnect between compose and actualy
view. WYSINWYG I guess.

I do remember that kind of behavior. It usually happens when the sender wrote an HTML mail. Replying in TB still does show formatted text, with vertical quote bars instead of >. Sometimes it's difficult to trim quotes and insert text of your own.

Only when sending this message is trimmed to text only, obviously with some flaws on invisible <p> and <br>.

- Martin