[Wylug-discuss] List Etiquette: Top Posting vs. Bottom Posting

[Lee Evans]

>I fully appreciate that MS Outlook has virtually enforced top posting of
>1-to-1 email across great swathes of t'Internet.

That's an unfair remark - Outlook is far from the only email client to use
this behavior by default; it's popularity is not a fair reason to apportion
blame when many of the popular alternatives behave in the exact same
manner. Indeed, you can configure Outlook to reply in whichever manner you
prefer.

Personally I find top-posting to be more often than not the better option
for 1-to-1 emails where I am already familiar with the previous issues and
as such can quickly and easily read and respond if necessary.

>For what it's worth, my personal opinion is that bottom posting still
>offers significant advantages for threaded discussion, especially where
>long threads are involved and where there are any number of interleaved
>responses. 

I agree wholeheartedly - be that in community / 1-to-many or 1-to-1
situations, where there is a large and / or complex number of points which
each need individual responses a snip/quote/response (hopefully such as
this) message is by far the easier to read and digest.

>Neither IMAP nor POP downloads line-by-line.  POP will download the
>whole message whether you read it or not, IMAP might be able to save
>time by splitting headers and body, but it will still download the whole
>body if you start to read a message.  You might save some time (assuming
>you never have to read context) with a webmail browser, but you won't
>save bandwidth.  This is a non-argument.

That's not true - a large proportion of mobile devices allow you to
configure a POP/IMAP email account and specify a finite limit on the amount
of message you download, usually in KB.

It's perfectly feasible to set this pretty low in the expectation that,
with top-posted replies, you're going to get the bit you need and not
another copy of content you've probably downloaded in a previous message.

On that basis, top-posted responses would become favourable. However, I
don't think this should be a consideration of the sender - most people
aren't reading mails on mobile devices nor paying per-KB so I don't think
it's fair to expect that be a consideration during composition.

Personally, I think the type of posting to use depends on the message in
question as others have, directly and indirectly, suggested. Horses for
courses, as they say.

>From my own perspective, some messages require a point-by-point reply and a
rebuttal-follows-quote method is logical, easy to read, and, to me at the
least, the best, as cited above.

I don't like top-posted replies where it isn't immediately obvious - be
that from having personally read the previous messages in the thread or
from a cursory glance at previous content - what the context or relevance
of the message is. 

I particularly don't like bottom-posted replies which have not been
appropriately snipped - glancing through the previous poster's entire (or a
large proportion of) message to find a small, often pointless, response
either thrown somewhere in the middle or at the very bottom of a fully
quoted message is, for me at least, far more infuriating than being able to
see at-a-glance in the top-posted alternative that the message doesn't
interest me and I don't need to waste any more time on it.

I'd like to see more of a distinction made between simple bottom-posting
and a well quoted, quote precedes response format. I think we should
discourage the former as vehemently as we discourage top-posting, and
encourage the latter. Whilst I know many have a passionate dislike of
top-posting, I find that the same thing simply flipped (by this I mean the
entire previous message is quoted, without snipping and often with
signatures/disclaimers etc in tact) is just - and in some cases much more -
annoying.

Regards

Lee
-- 
Lee Evans