[arch-general] Quoting of E-mails

[Ng Oon-Ee]

On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 04:43 -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 05:12:31PM +0800, Ng Oon-Ee wrote:
> > Probably because (in my experience at least) top-posting occurs much
> > more frequently than "me too" posts at least, probably more frequently
> > than improper quoting as well.
> 
> And yet when I see the top-posted mails, most of the time I don't need
> to read the rest of the previously quoted message - especially if I'm
> on a roll and am familiar with the current thread.  I guess if one is
> reading for a historical perspective then it makes more sense to put
> the reply at the bottom but then I found myself having to read the
> history over and over again.  If I addopt bottom posting, I plan then
> to delete all but the most recent post to keep thing conscise.
> Actually I'm run into *MANY* of these huge long threads in a single
> message to have a "Mee to" or "+1" at the bottom  That's why I found
> that style to be so inefficient and wasting of my time.

Honestly, I just scroll straight to the bottom, Evolution marks all the
quoted stuff for me anyway so that the real replies stand out. With
bottom-posting the wasted time is the amount of time taken to scroll to
the bottom. With top posting the wasted time is having to scroll down
for perspective. I'd wager a quick scroll is faster than having to
scroll up and down to read and get perspective.

However, in the end its more of a consensus thing. MLs generally agree
on bottom-posting, and so top-posting in that context, whatever its
merits, isn't good manners. Similarly bottom-posting my replies to my
relatives "hi how are you" emails is very bad manners. To each their
own.
> 
> Actually when you think about it, most blogs are all in reverse
> chronical order which to me is the same thing as top-posting and
> nobody seems to complain about that concept.

This is slightly off-tangent, but personally I feel blogs are less
dependent on context, with each post standing on its own, whereas email
threads are very context dependent as each new mail is a REPLY to the
one before.

Honestly, my ultimate solution would look very much like gmail's
'threaded view'. Unfortunately no desktop app that I've seen manages to
get a similar handling =(.