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, productivity

Greg Welch has updated MailRecent , his quick-filing plugin for Mail.app.

The updated version now distinguishes duplicate mailbox names by adding the account to which they belong.

It is also smarter about dealing with people who try to use it with the number of recent items to display (you can set this in the Appearances pane of System Preferences) set to zero.

It is now a kick-ass, error-free plugin for people who like to file their messages quickly in this way.

At the same time, Dan Frakes at Macworld has written up a nice review of both Greg’s Mail plugins — MailRecent and MailFollowup — for his MacGems column.

He covers them in praise,

MailFollowup and MailRecent are sure to be welcome by heavy users of Mail. And the best thing about them is that they’re so well integrated into Mail that they seem as if they’ve been part of the app from the beginning. (And some would argue that they very well should have been.)

mail.app, apple mail, replying, plugins, filing, productivity

MailFollowup is a Mail.app plugin that allows you to “follow up” or send subsequent thoughts to all the recipients of an email more easily and naturally.

It adds a “Followup” commands to Apple Mail’s Message and Contextual Menus, so that the To, Cc: and Bcc: addresses appear in the reply exactly as they appeared in the original message:

The developer Greg Welch has released an updated version that fixes a small problem in the Contextual menu.

Since I posted about this plugin in April, it has also been recompiled as a universal binary and plays better with Mail Act-on.

MailFollowup is freeware and available from Greg’s web site .plugins, mail.app, apple mail, conversations, email, replying

Greg Welch, an Associate Professor in Computer Science at UNC, Chapel Hill, has written a nifty plugin for Mail.app that allows you to “follow up” or send subsequent thoughts to all the recipients of an email more easily and naturally.

He found that he often wanted to send an afterthought or important observation to an email after his initial reply. Mail’s default “Reply All” function only places only the original sender’s email address into the To: field, skewing the emphasis in a group conversation.

His plugin adds a “Followup” commands to Apple Mail’s Message and Contextual Menus, so that the To, Cc: and Bcc: addresses appear in the reply exactly as they appeared in the original message:

Scott Morrison, the developer of Mail Act-on and MailTags, also contributed some code and advice to the project.

Installation instructions and the offer of email support for the plugin can be found on Greg’s web site as can the plugin itself.replying, afterthoughts, follow up, plugin, mail.app, apple mail