I dont have enough email conversations on the go at one time that I ever forget what they are about and need to check the bottom again.

Even so, I’m sure you occasionally get things that would be a little wacky out of order. If nothing else, every e-mailer I know occasionally gets a “oops, here’s the attachment I said was on the last message” :-)

I don’t notice it, probably because I dont have enough email conversations on the go at one time that I ever forget what they are about and need to check the bottom again.

I need more friends obviously ;-)

It often causes a switch of attention focus to the bottom of a message to gain context about what I’m reading at the top.

When necessary, I want to quickly “grok” any older contextual content before reading newer content. So, as a top-to-bottom reader, putting the old after the new with top-posting has an unnaturally backwards flow for me.

I have a similar frustration using mail clients that try forcing me to read newest messages first, as though I’d rather see something written without having any context about it from older related messages.

There are situations when newest-first is desirable but I don’t think that should be the default method of e-mail correspondence, which top-posting and newest-first clients seem to encourage.

Always a fun topic, is this. :-)

Live previews are for those who want their information quickly and with no additional mouse clicks or scrolling. :-P

(Actually, Live Comment Preview was just the first WordPress plug-in that I stumbled across on the Net.)

I never thought of it before. When I started this blog, no one commented much.

Sorry about the bolded last line there. You ever gonna add a Preview button to this comment box?

I think as long as you are able and willing to trim & quote when it’s neccesary to convey context, I don’t have any argument with you.

For the trivial cases, I don’t notice or care about the quoting style on messages I receive. If you know how to handle yourself when it matters, that’s plenty good enough.

I’d still feel a little dirty if I actually did it, though :-P

[ Bonus content: my favorite reply to any message this week:

Yum. Er. Um. Brr. Hmm???

That was sent to me as a top-post, no less. :-) ]

I think that the biggest argument in favour of top-posting (apart from my beautiful if tendentious metaphor of the fridge) is the efficiency with which it imparts the information you need. 95% of the time, I remember what I was replying to. So I don’t need to scroll at all.

Of course, you and Joe have an excellent point about multi-issues replies to which there is no top-posting answer, but I don’t think more than 20% of my emails fall into that category. For the most part, they are answers to single issues.

I’m not to worried about the untrimmed rubbish underneath a top-posted reply. At least my replies are in plain text and pretty small, even when I (gasp!) forget to trim myself.

I feel a “tease-free consensus” coming on that the happiest person is the one able to do both as and if needed, with some energy left over to worry some of the important things in their lives. What do you think?