Jon Reynolds wrote: > On Wed, November 23, 2011 10:07, Philip Stubbs wrote: > > ...At work, my boss > > may have a long back and forth with a supplier, and then suddenly > > include me with a 'What do you think?' type message. In that > > situation, I am glad that they have top posted, including all the > > old messages, as I can then look back and see what has already been > > covered by all parties. > > Not sure I get this bit, wouldn't that be a great argument for > bottom-posting? You suddenly get copied in on a conversation type > email and have to make sense of the flow. Reading it from top to > bottom in chronological order (like a conversation in a novel) would > be easier. With top-posted back and forth type conversations, you > have to go to the bottom, read, then scroll up, then read down, etc...
Only if they'd bottom posted all the time and never snipped, which would be infuraiating for everybody else already involved. In that sort of circumstance, the most convenient sane means is to always top post and leave everything intact underneath; the whole conversation is there under each email which nobody needs to see unless they want it. This is annoying on mailing lists where people generally are there from start to finish and volume is generally _much_ higher so that several-KB payload of just-in-case is bigger. It's also generally archived somewhere already so you never *need* it to catch up. Bottom-posting is great for preserving the context, but it only does so (reasonably) for one or two emails. If you're quoting three or four deep then you're probably doing something wrong. Really, neither makes much of a functional difference to how useful the email is so long as everyone's doing it much the same way. It's only when one or two people in a conversation insist on doing it differently that where the replies go matters, and even there the problem isn't preciely what people are doing, but the fact they're breaking the convention. -- Avi. -- Avi -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
