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 .