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 .

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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.

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• Shooting yourself in the foot (or head):
  One round in the bottom- vs. top-posting war
• Joe Kissell on top- vs bottom-posting
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• An ode to bottom-posting
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No doubt the Internet will be soggy with self-indulgent nostalgia today. Here’s my contribution.

Hawk Wings spluttered into life at the end of July this year as a way to learn about blogging and as a tribute to a little app that I quite like.

It was relaxing and a pleasant distraction from the real world, so I continued. Over the last five months, a few of my posts proved popular (by Hawk Wings’ standards) with readers:

Top Five Most Popular Posts

1. MacFreePOPs: Getting emails from hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, SquirrelMail, AOL, etc. MacFreePOPs just seems to run and run. I don’t know where the hits come from, but it is by far the most popular thing I ever blogged.
2. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have. Recent and popular, some people found this a useful entry point into the world of plug-ins and/or fun to disagree with.
3. Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail. With help from Andreas Amann, this post collected some helpful ways to make the break from Thunderbird.
4. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail. Never was a niche market focussed on time-efficiency willing to spend so much time reading about how to do it :-)
5. Apple Mail: The Early Years. My first blogging “triumph”. The pre-history of Mail.app as NeXTMail in NeXTSTEP.

But sometimes it happens — on blogs and in life — that the best things are not the most popular ones.

Here are five posts that added something which wasn’t there before:

Top Five Best Posts

1. Apple Mail: The Early Years. With help from Don Yacktman and John Kheit, I was able to gather together some oral history before it disappears.
2. Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod. Jeffrey Glover was kind enough to share a step-by-step walk-through on storing your Mail folder on a iPod.
3. What’s in your Mail folder?. A Cook’s Tour of your Mail folder. Poking around in order to write this was fun.
4. Services and Apple Mail. A small contribution to a much neglected aspect of Mac OS X and of working smarter in Apple Mail.
5. Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part I and Part II. Blogging is often about being a magpie, picking shiny things out of the never-ending piles of other people’s posts.

   Here I think I really wrestled something to the ground, got some understanding of GTD, and produced two posts that added a bit to the ways in which Mail.app can be used.

Of course, there were less successful moments too.

I discovered several new Mail features that have been around since Jaguar and completely misunderstood what the new iChat SSL certificates were about. Also my arguments in favour of top-posting proved more persuasive to me than anyone else.

Since its birth in July, Hawk Wings has served 901,547 pages and moved up 3,099,986 places in Technorati’s rankings. Nothing to be too proud of, as there are still 22,669 blogs people would rather read than this one.

See you in 2006 (unless 10.4.4 sees us first).

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I confess. I enjoy teasing hard-core ideologues who consider top-posting in emails to be history’s most heinous crime. It’s a character flaw, but I can’t help it.

My post did, however, prompt a most sensible and balanced response from Joe Kissell, the author of Taking Control of Apple Mail in Tiger, worth quoting in full:

I generally prefer bottom posting, and mention that fact in my ebooks about Mail. But then, I also recommend selective quoting, not simply including the entire content of an email in a reply. The two practices make sense if done together, and less sense if you do only one. I wouldn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t put a reply beneath several quoted paragraphs, because that?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s hard to read and annoying. But I would pull out a relevant sentence or two, to remind the recipient exactly what it is I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m commenting on.

A situation where I often use top posting is if an entire message makes just one point or asks one question. In that case, there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s no reason to go to the extra effort of pulling out bits and commenting beneath them. But if a message makes multiple points or asks multiple questions, and I intend to address them one at a time, bottom posting is the only way to go, because it gives the recipient context for each remark.

Regrettably intelligent remarks which put teasing in its place.

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• Shooting yourself in the foot (or head):
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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.

(more…)

Related posts

• The sorrows of top-posting despite oneself
• Wired copy chief vents spleen over language and email
• Joe Kissell on top- vs bottom-posting
• Gruber’s bottom-posting scripts for Mail.app
• An ode to bottom-posting