* Akkana Peck <akk...@shallowsky.com> [05-13-18 10:35]: > Brian Salter-Duke writes: > > My partner reads gmail on her phone or tablet. [ ... ] > > If I had bottom posting, she would never have read my message, thinking > > that some how she had got her email back again. > > If that's true, you're not trimming enough. The idea isn't to quote > the other person's entire message and put your reply underneath -- > that's annoying on any platform, not just on phones. The idea is to > quote a few lines of context before your reply, and remove the rest. > If someone wants to read the entire previous message, they can use > the list archive. > > In a later message, Brian Salter-Duke writes (after 32 lines of > two levels of unedited quoted material): > > We have had 20 years or so to educate people to bottom post. We have almost > > entirely failed. > > That failed because a few companies that provided the email software > for a high proportion of users, notably Google and Microsoft, > opted to configure their mail software to add a blank line at the > top of the message, thus implying people should put their reply there. > Users took the hint, and that was when everybody started switching > to top-posting. It wasn't nearly as common before the Gmail default > changed; I think Outlook's default had changed quite a bit earlier, > and corporate users had been top-posting for quite a while, but it > wasn't that common for ordinary users or mailing lists until Gmail > changed. > > If everybody used mutt, the top-posting scourge wouldn't have > happened. :-)
I really believe it (top-posting, full quoting) began with compuserve and aol, really discouraging time in history. -- (paka)Patrick Shanahan Plainfield, Indiana, USA @ptilopteri http://en.opensuse.org openSUSE Community Member facebook/ptilopteri Registered Linux User #207535 @ http://linuxcounter.net Photos: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/piwigo paka @ IRCnet freenode
