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
• The sorrows of top-posting despite oneself
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• Joe Kissell on top- vs bottom-posting

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:

• Bottom posters rejoice! QuoteFix plugin is here
• The sorrows of top-posting despite oneself
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• Shooting yourself in the foot (or head):
  One round in the bottom- vs. top-posting war

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
• Bottom posters rejoice! QuoteFix plugin is here
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  One round in the bottom- vs. top-posting war
• Joe Kissell on top- vs bottom-posting

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). Similar Posts:

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• A small statistical celebration

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.Similar Posts:

• Gruber’s bottom-posting scripts for Mail.app
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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.

1. People have bottom-posted from the beginning. It’s tradition. It’s the badge of my geekdom, the sign of my tribe.
2. Bottom-posting follows more naturally the conventions of a conversation or narrative. You get a more natural flow by bottom-posting.
3. (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.

Similar Posts:

• The sorrows of top-posting despite oneself
• Gruber’s bottom-posting scripts for Mail.app
• An ode to bottom-posting
• Bottom posters rejoice! QuoteFix plugin is here
• Joe Kissell on top- vs bottom-posting