Few things get the juices flowing faster than the top- vs. bottom-posting debate.
What seems natural to one user is an abomination to another; ideology does war with utility and efficiency; anathemas and personal abuse fly faster than they did at the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) (Wikpedia 
).
It can lead to guilt trips.
I’m pretty relaxed about it personally (although see an earlier attempt to develop a new metaphor in defence of top-posting).
John Gruber is not so relaxed. He calls top-posting “an uncouth and illiterate practice”.
And he has written a script that will over-ride Mail’s default top-posting behaviour.
Select an email in Mail’s message viewer, activate the script and Mail will produce a reply, quoting the text of the email and placing the cursor at the bottom ready for your couth and literate response.
Block a selection of text in the preview pane, and only that text appears in the reply.
It doesn’t work well with signatures generated by Mail itself, placing the cursor after the signature, although as John points out, Textexpander is a smarter, application-independent solution to signatures anyway.
While we are on the topic: You can play around a bit with the placement and format of the reply string in Mail.app:
Due to his new iPhone, John is currently cranking out applescripts for Mail. See also his quick and dirty “Inbox to Archive sweep” script .
> John Gruber is not so relaxed. He calls top-posting “an uncouth and illiterate practiceâ€.
However, in a second post on the subject he says that by “bottom posting” he meant, as most people do, interleaving–as described here:
http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/bottom-posting.html
If one is going to edit the original message down and insert answers inline, which seems a sensible enough practice–not quote everything and begin under it–I can’t see it matters if the cursor starts at the top.
But I’d agree that Mail assumes the user will be top-posting, because it doesn’t add sig-delimters to signatures and can’t recognize and strip them and the following sig-block on replies.
I found out recently that–surprisingly–Entourage, unlike Mail.app, has got signature-handling. So it seems not all of Microsoft is wedded to the top-posting paradigm.
http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2007/06/signature_blocks_and_netiquett.html
I think bottom posting is an abomination! It’s an unfortunate holdover from when geeks controlled usenet and e-mail rules. Why should I have to re-read a full conversation before getting on with the latest post? The main argument seems to be that I would be so dull witted that I can’t keep the prior conversation strait and would somehow be unable to refer to what’s posted below if I needed to refresh my memory. Can you imagine what it would be like if in order to say something to someone on the street, you would have to repeat everything that was said prior to that?
http://travisbell.com/post/5416573
Heh, I don’t agree with it. But here’s to all who do. :)
On my side, again, I find top posting an abhorrent practice.
Interleaved posting (what most people mean when they refer to bottom posting) allows me to keep track of which portions of an email you agree or disagree with. Which portions you feel I should pay particular attention to. Which portion, exactly, you feel should be for my attention.
Unlike the previous poster, I am one of those geeks. And, also apparently unlike the previous poster, I have more than one email “conversation” I attempt to keep track of at any one time. And since I need to respond with an informed decision, view or opinion, I do find that I can not always remember the context of the issue under discussion in an email.
Expecting me to reread the whole email (and in reverse yet!) just because you’re too lazy or ignorant to trim to the relevant data is rude, obnoxious and arrogant. And it certainly tells me that the sender considers their time infinitely more important than mine.
With the current state of top posting the full email gets sent hither and thither, normally with a very informative and thought-provoking “FYI” or “I agree” as the only addition added to the top of the email. Well, either say something useful or be quiet, is my normal stance on that. Otherwise rather quote nothing and post “I agree” if you expect me to refer to the mail thread.
Or do the sane, civilised and respectful thing. Quote what exactly it is that you agree to or with, if you find that your sole contribution to the conversation must be an “I agree”.
@earth2kelly:
A: It destroys the flow of conversation.
Q: What’s wrong with top-posting?
You’re missing the arguments main point. The main point of bottom posting is that it makes it less of a hassle to NOT quote the entire message at all! Why should you “have to re-read a full conversation before getting on with the latest post?” — Good question! Why are you quoting the full original post?
Regular conversations on the street do not sometimes last for weeks, if they did it would be understood to have a little context before you continue.
A: “Hey remember that project we were talking about last week?”
B: “Yes.”
A: “Well to hell with it.”
As opposed to:
A: “Hey… To hell with it.”
B: “Uhh, wha–”
A:
B: “Oh… uhh… that was unneccessary…”
The idea is to only quote what will provide context to your NEW comments. If I’m a busy guy and I have, at any given moment, something like 10-50 email conversations going on at once (not to mention real world conversations in between) then it is not entirely shocking that I might want to reread a little of what was said previously. In that case WHY would I want to scroll PAST the new stuff, find the relevant parts in paragraphs and paragraphs of old replies and then scroll BACK UP to read the new stuff… It should be inline, and it should be snipped to only include the relevant parts.
So, don’t be so literal. “Bottom posting” doesn’t mean to literally go to the bottom of every email to write your response, it means to be smart about what you are quoting in the first place and write your response with context in a logical way.
That said, keep in mind that for a 1on1 conversation where you are saying things like:
A: “Want to come over saturday?”
B: “Sure.”
It’s unnecessary for context at all so just stick with tacking your response on top, it’s simpler, the person wont need context (unless they maybe come back month from now to read the conversation) — it all depends on what you’re emailing about. Responding to a flame war thread RE: GPLv3 in the Linux kernel mailing list requires more thoughtful quoting/context than telling your grandma you loved the cookies.
Thank you,
Ryan
Philosophy aside, I’ve been using Gruber’s script since Hawk Wings linked to it, except I use Shift-Command-R since I use Command-R frequently in the Finder to “Show [Reveal] Original.” It’s always worked fine until today, the day after I updated to 10.4.11 (perhaps a coincidence). I changed the 0.5-second delay in the script to 1 second and all is OK now. Could be 0.5 second was always “on the edge” in my setup.