Hawk Wings » bottom-posting

Bottom posters rejoice! QuoteFix plugin is here

Tim Gaden — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:38:44 +0000

Nothing raises the temperature among email aficionados like the debate over top-posting and bottom-posting in replies.

I have my own barbaric views on this topic.

QuoteFix is a plugin for mail.app that answers every bottom-poster’s heart-felt cry.

When installed, it places the cursor below the original message, or below the selection if you highlighted some part of the message before hitting the reply button.

And it does it well:

It also claims to remove the signature from the original message and to remove unnecessary empty lines from the original message.

I have found performance more patchy on these two fronts, but the plugin is still in active beta development, so it’s unreasonable to expect too much.

If bottom posting is your thing and you use mail.app, you will want to test it for yourself.

Get the QuoteFix plugin and read the installation instructions on its Google Code page.mail.app, apple mail, bottom posting, top posting, plugin, signatures, wars of religionSimilar Posts:

Gruber’s bottom-posting scripts for Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:11:29 +0000

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 . top posting, bottom posting, anathema, chalcedon, mail.app, apple mail, replying, applescript, productivitySimilar Posts:

The sorrows of top-posting despite oneself

Tim Gaden — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:29:38 +0000

David Heinemeier at Signal vs. Noise posts an extended apology about his ever-encroaching top-posting habits.

As Hawk Wings readers know, I am a top-poster—proud, unrepentant, barbaric—so I read with interest his struggle between tradition (bottom-posting) and what comes naturally in many email clients (top-posting). Perhaps you will too.

Also interesting was the suggestion in the comments that “the stigma of top posting seems to be an artifact of newsgroups”.

Usenet continues to torture people with “posting guilt” long after its dominance on the Internet has faded.email, top-posting, bottom-posting, guilt, tradition, usenet Similar Posts:

An ode to bottom-posting

Tim Gaden — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:02:32 +0000

I think that bottom-posting is an odd convention that has passed its use-by date.

But it seems that not everyone agrees with me ;-)

TonyAndrewMeyer presents an impassioned – and very impressive – ode to bottom-posting as the embodiment of all that is noble, true, good and excellent in email communication.Similar Posts:

Shooting yourself in the foot (or head): One round in the bottom- vs. top-posting war

Tim Gaden — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 11:47:10 +0000

First, there is no end to the debate on top-posting vs. bottom-posting in this life and, possibly, in the next. I understand that.

Secondly, I should disclose that I am a top-poster.

Thirdly, the obvious pathos of the message notwithstanding, I have never seen a more perfect, self-contained demonstration of the failings of bottom-posting than the following, which appeared on a mailing list ten days ago:

When it gets past the “Bottom-posting is better”, “No, it isn’t!”, “Yes, it is!”, “No it isn’t!!” stage, bottom posters produce three arguments to defend their practice, arguments that are outlined after the jump.

In the years that I have been following this debate and in which my own habits were formed, bottom-posters have relied on three arguments, two spoken and one unspoken.

People have bottom-posted from the beginning. It’s tradition. It’s the badge of my geekdom, the sign of my tribe.

Bottom-posting follows more naturally the conventions of a conversation or narrative. You get a more natural flow by bottom-posting.

(Unspoken). Microsoft’s email clients encourage top-posting. Only by bottom-posting can we resist the ever-encroaching darkness.

Only the second argument has enough substance to warrant a reply.

I think that it has its origins in the early years of the Internet, when email was a new thing. “What’s an email like?”, people asked themselves. It’s like a novel or a letter or the transcript of a conversation (e.g. Hansard, a legal transcript), they decided, in which the newest thing comes after what followed before. By analogy, new stuff belongs at the end. Bottom-posting is born.

I don’t find this argument convincing in theory or practice.

In fact, the metaphor of email as letter or transcript sucks.

Internet communication is more like a notice-board or the bits of paper on the front of your fridge. The most recent, currently-important stuff is on the top. Blogs understand this. They top-post. Some discussion boards and forums understand this. News sites understand this. They have a better metaphor; they all top-post.

In practice the situation is just as bad. Bottom-posting means scrolling down past inches of text that you already remember or don’t need to know, in order to read the poster’s contribution. The Mighty Mouse gets a good work-out, but it’s a bad result for efficiency or sensible communication. Imagine burrowing down to the bottom of the pile of notes on your fridge to find the newest. Who would put up with that?

What’s more, it leads people to top post that there is a bottom post.

All talk of metaphors to one side, top-posting is smarter in practice too. From a functional perspective, it is far more efficient to scroll down on the rare occasions when you need to double-check something than being forced to scroll down every time.

It’s polite. It’s respectful of the reader’s time and intelligence.

It’s just better.

Being a reasonable, open-minded person, known to swing both ways, I am open to being persuaded by other arguments for bottom-posting that I may have missed or misunderstood.

Literary Appendix (Satirical)

It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs before we eat them, was upon the larger end: but his present Majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the Emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs.

The people so highly resented this law, that our Histories tell us there have been six rebellions raised on that account, wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown…

… It is computed, that eleven thousand persons have, at several times, suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volums have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-Endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments.

During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Brundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text: for their words are these; That all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end: and which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion, to be left to every man’s conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Book 2

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