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This is an excellent list. I think TR should include
this as a download.  I was somewhat dismayed to learn that my email intelligence was around 90%.
Unfortunately, I have been guilty of top posting. Generally, I
consider myself to have good online etiquette, but I was never sure what to do
about top posting. You will be glad to know that this blog has cured me
of the habit. I passed your other guidelines with flying colors, with two caveats. I
use Office to spell check my messages, and my corporate email is required to be
several lines long.

Again, this is a great list. I'm pleased to have inspired it.

Generally a good list but:
1. You violated your own rule "be a completely gratuitous windbag" - but it was mostly amusing.
2. I don't agree completely with your rule about top-posting. I like top-posting when I am corresponding with one or two others and I mostly always delete any parts of the thread that are not relevant. In that context, I know what the thread was and I don't want to scroll through it again.
In all other cases it is important to go with the flow (as in all matters of etiquette). If you are mailing to a group where everyone top-posts then follow that approach. If you are the first to reply or if everyone else is doing it, then by all means bottom post. But above all else, take the time to think about the way you reply.
Don't post in-line unless you are in a situation where you are pretty sure no-one else is going to reply. Following an interleaved thread is almost impossible.
 

" Generally a good list "
Thanks!
" You violated your own rule 'be a completely gratuitous windbag' - but it was mostly amusing. "
Of course I did. Great fun all around.
" I don't agree completely with your rule about top-posting. "
That's only because you're an uncultured heathen.
" I know what the thread was and I don't want to scroll through it again. "
Then why don't you just cut out the parts you don't want to scroll through again?
" Don't post in-line unless you are in a situation where you are pretty sure no-one else is going to reply. Following an interleaved thread is almost impossible. "
Odd, nobody seems to have such problems in any of the discussion threads I've ever run across and, in fact, I have never heard of anyone complaining about such a thing before, ever, while holy wars between Outlook Express indoctrinated top posters and "everyone else" bottom posters seem to crop up semi-regularly. In fact, I've seen discussions that would have been almost entirely impossible to follow without interleaved posting because responses to divergent points in the same email were made.
Maybe that's just me, though.

The more I think about it, the more I think that top-posting depends on the audience and type of conversation.  I've done it in the past when replying to something that is not going to continue for many replies, and even then I crop as needed. I can certainly see how it would be confusing in a series of replies particularly in an email discussion list or something like that.

Personally I prefer that people replying to my mails top post. It means that the message that I want to read is at the top, and if we have all been top posting, that the most recent peice of histoy is directly below it. I really hate having to wade through all of the history before I can get to the latest reply, at the end.

I'll violate one of your rules right now by digressing slightly.  As a "guru of the English language", I'm certain you didn't choose your apotheon identity without considering its etymology.  As a former student of Greek, it reads to me like "out from God" (or, "out from a god").
apotheon.com gives the following definition:
apotheon (n): 1. one who is exalted or elevated to a state of godhood. 2. an individual element of a greater, transcendent whole.
Presumably the first definition is related to apotheosis.  The second fits better with my understanding of Greek.
So, would you care to elucidate your use of the term?
BTW, I'm a top-poster.  Sorry.

Nice list. I'm with master3bs on top posting.  I would never do it in public forum; and it's one of the things I dislike about conventional blog formats.  But if I'm swapping messages with only one other person, why scroll to the bottom each time? Regarding rule 2, in a work environment you may not want to selectively edit.  I only keep the last message in an exchange, so I may need the history later to CMA. Rule 9a - If your client supports alternate signatures like Outlook does, use a shorter signature, or even no sig, for replies.

There is nothing wrong with "top posting". The sender of the email knows what he/she wrote and can just scroll down if necessary to check. On long exchanges it is obviously much quicker and better to "top post". I believed that the most important points regarding replying to emails are: 1.? Read the email properly and reply to all the points raised. 2.? Make the reply as short as possible. The above also applies to mail, if anyone is still writing it! ??

In our group a quick poll was 100% for top posting of e-mails. The most common reasons were:
1. I already read the previous text. Why read it again?
2. It faster and easier than having to scroll through the same text I just read yesterday or even a few hours ago.

Peronally, I find top posting a much better idea - at least in threaded newsgroups. It's a real PITA to have to scroll to the bottom of each message as you click through the thread. In the vast majority of cases I have just finished reading the previous message - I don't want to have to wade through it again just to figure out at what point you decided to add your 2 cents.The rest of your list I agree with.

Good list - but in the corporate world "top posting" is the norm.  GarryAllen's post says why.  Also, 'cropping' not that common as the complete trail may need to be visible in the event of a dispute.

Obviously, one of your primary uses of email is to participate in mailing lists, hence your adversion to "top-posting." (A term that I had never heard before, probably because I don't do mailing lists.) I contend that mailing lists are not really email. They are, well...mailing lists. All they are doing is using email as a transport mechanism.
"Normal" email traffic consists people conducting a continuious stream of active communication. In "normal" emails, top-posting is the expected norm and, IMHO, bottom-posting (if that's the proper term) would be a huge irritant and should get the sender flamed by anyone and everyone. Besides, if you are in a normal email environment where top-posting is the norm, bottom-posting would be extremely confusing to the receivers and since communication is the reason for sending an email, bottom-posting should be avoided.
So there we have it. If you're participating in a mailing list, especially any draconian groups as were described in the originial post, then by all means bottom-post. Otherwise when working in the normal email world, top-post.

Sorry, but you are wrong about top posting. I've been doing e-mail in
one form or another since the late '70's and have always top posted. It
was the way I was taught to do it on the lists I subscribed to and by
the email I recieved wheter or not from lists. If one is reading a
thread, you already know, or should know, what has gone on before. It
is acceptable to post quotes from the message(s) you are replying to
within the body of your message and do away with the continuum which
follows, so long as the quote is not out of context.

The idea of top posting being bad is a relatively new one, and I have
unsubscribed from lists who insist on replies being placed at the
bottom of a message. There is a reason why most e-mail editors place
the cursor at the top of a reply.

There is nothing more annoying than to have to scroll through six
messages to reach the new text (which may or may not be properly
segregated), which may only be a few lines. Takes more time to scroll
than to read the text.

 Also, yo should have mentione to use plain text. Use of HTML, or,
in the case of MS products, RTF for messages is overkill and not
necesary for the most part. There are sometimes, such as representing a
scientific formula, whe the use of HTML may be indicated. If you must
use eye-candy, even the graphic emoticons, within your text, you
probably don't have anything worth saying. Also, even though the cost
of storage has gone way down, such messages, even if text only, take
more space to store.

\\Steve//

I have to agree with most of the other posters here.  Top-posting is only good when the readers are typically seeing a message and replies for the first time where the text will be read in "logical" order as you put it.  In more common corporate exchanges, top-posting is preferred because we know what the previous messages were about and we only want to see the most recent reply.  The rest is included only for reference and so we only have to archive the last exchange and all replies are then included.  Top-posting may be a good rule for some things but it isn't a solid rule for every situation.  Someone who rants about top-posters in all situations isn't paying attention.

This used to be a matter of preference/style until Outlook/Outlook
Express became the dominant mail client.  Now users are nearly
forced to top post.  The way it does quoting and indenting makes
it difficult for people unused to the proper ways to even see how bad
their reply is going to look.  Also, with the cost of sending an
email being virtually $0.00 per byte, it is not a concern (or even a
thought) how large the email is.  Send 600 lines of quoted text, including quoted sigs , with a 12 meg WMV file attachment. No problem at all.

john alley said:
Don't post in-line unless you are in a situation where you are
pretty sure no-one else is going to reply. Following an interleaved
thread is almost impossible.

$DEITY preserve us!  Impossible for a raccoon, maybe.  No,
even they have the brain capacity to read an email conversation the
proper and most coherent way it can be posted.

I can't understand it.  First people claim that top posting makes
it easier to follow a conversation, an idea whose idiocy has only
become even more pronounced over time, now a statement like this. 
Our schools much have stopped teaching common sense and basic
intellectual understanding.  No wonder the US sucks at anything
requiring more than two braincells.

If this is the current quality of TR membership then it's questionable whether there's any viable reason to remain a member.

There is obviously a lot of controvery on top posting.  It has become the norm because this is how every e-mail tool out there works.  I think if our tools better accomodated the natural flow of a conversation we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

80% of users are tech-inept.  If top posting was as so hard to read, as you suggest, I doubt people would have continued accepting and doing it. More importantly however, we live in an age of SmartPhones & PDAs, I'll be damned if I'm going to scroll through pages of useless information to get to the simply reply I wanted.  I am a top-poster and will continue to be. TOP POSTERS UNITE!

Who the hell are you and how much longer will this link be on every TR page?
esabatm

Apotheon wrote: "Odd, nobody seems to have such problems in any of the discussion threads I've ever run across and, in fact, I have never heard of anyone complaining about such a thing before, ever, while holy wars between Outlook Express indoctrinated top posters and 'everyone else' bottom posters seem to crop up semi-regularly."
Roughly 80% of the responses here seem to disagree with you on top-posting (plus this post, as well). Most people in a corporate setting have been in on the thread, so they don't want to scroll down to see the latest reply, but the rest of the conversation is there if you need to go back for reference or save it for documentation. So, apparently only about 20% makes up the "everyone else" you were referring to. I think I'll stick with top posting.  In fact, if everyone would top post, I think that might actually take care of your 2nd point as well. The other 8 are pretty good, though.
So for the first person who added the post, perhaps you don't want to change yet.
And for the person a couple of posts above who suggests that all of us TechRepublic members are idiots and maybe he shouldn't continue to be a member, I wish him well in his future endeavors. Perhaps he could start a new IT community where only those with superior intellect and e-mailing capabilities can join.

1. This has been effectively refuted in other posts. It's not that bottom posting isn't a good thing, it's your monomaniacal insistence upon it in all circumstances. 2. Agreed 3. Nope. Not anymore at least. I've been using email for a couple of decades, and until 5-10 years ago I'd have agreed with you. But today, it's up to the text-based client to parse a message and remove the html. No one cares whether someone using Mutt gets spaghetti html. For portable devices the point is more valid, but they also should have enough horsepower to lose the html on their own. No one argues that word processors shouldn't have styled text, even if its use is often abused. Why should email be different? The argument is academic, in any case. The war is over. You lost. 4,5. OK. 6. Hmm. Following this in the previous item "So: be humble.", we get this here: "I'm a spelling and grammar guru with the
English language". Good spelling is good. But worse than bad spelling are the gurus who delight in pointing out some trivial typo in an otherwise brilliant post. 7,8. OK 9. OK, sort of. Though your yammering on about line width violates your own "Don't be a completely gratuitous
windbag" dictum. 10. See 3 (PO?). Hard line wraps are only necessary if you insist upon plain text email and crummy email clients. I don't care if someone's mailreader doesn't handle line wraps gracefully. That's so last millennium. Another battle lost in a futile war. Bonus: Yup. Though, in this era of broadband, many ISP's continued use of a 20yr old message size limit stricture of 5MB is silly. Kind of like 20yr old plaintext message format strictures.

In this world of mostly top-posters, I am really pleased when somebody
replies to me with a bottom-posted message.  It is Sturgeon's 10
percent and I feel blessed when it happens.

Just because you've done something for 30 years doesn't mean that it's
the best thing to do, today, even though there were quite likely good
reasons for it, once upon a time.  There is a good chance that the
original reasons have disappeared and all that's left is a habit.

Just because Microsoft tricks you into top-posting is no reason to keep it up.

You might have become so mouse-centric that scrolling has become a
chore.  I feel your pain.  In such a case, you probably don't
realize that a simple Ctrl-End key combination will take you to the
bottom of the message in most modern email clients.  Or a couple
of whacks on the PageDown key.  None of that bothersome scrolling.

A secretary taking the minutes of a meeting does not stack the
sentences in reverse order to which they were uttered.  The email
conversation is more followable (if I may?), if it is recorded in the
same manner as the minutes.  This, also, has become habit, but, a
more efficient habit...it flows.

If the message is only threaded by virtue of continuing subject
matter,  specifially, multiple subjects (like when you're catching
up with a long lost friend) bottom-posting and interleaved posting, in
the same message, works quite well.  This works best for me if I
can color code it, so as to be able to tell, at a glance, who said what
and in which reply they said it.  And cropping is an important
component of such a situation.

I can thinks of times when it doesn't really matter, but, I prefer bottom-posting...less chaotic!

Ya got me wound up, so, I think that
I'll say a little more.
I started out top-posting, as best as I
can remember, but, somewhere along the line I found myself writing
messages that were either very complex or had many replies and in either event they
required much re-reading in order to follow the thread as the replies
bounced back and forth. This re-reading was too complicated to do in
a top-posted message. I first started bottom-posting manually, just
to maintain the English language left-to-right top-to-bottom flow,
not realizing that it could be made automatic. Somewhere along the
line, I read similar material to what apotheon has posted, here. I then felt vindicated. Then, to
maintain consistency (the bugaboo of small minds?) with my
conversational cohorts, I went back to top-posting. Sometimes,
however, top-posting is just plain deficient. If you disagree then
you probably haven't had to deal with the levels of complexity that I
have in email, or, you're an extreme organizational genius.





There's a good chance that your message
exchanges don't normally evolve in a manner whereby it matters how
they are laid out. Do you primarily use email for forwarding
jokes, pictures, etc. and frequently say little or nothing? If so,
then, for you, it doesn't matter very much how it's posted. Are they
a series of short one or two line replies? This happens in personal
email, a lot, and in corporate email to such an extent that it
frequently resembles chat in it's brevity. Sometimes this actually
works better with top-posting.

Top-posting might be appropriate, if
your intent is to be creative (in the artistic sense).
Or playful.


I'd say that there are some good
reasons to change to bottom-posting, but, not to the exclusion of
other possibilities. If the message is programmatically
threaded, by all means, enhance the flow...bottom-post!  If it is a
complex and evolving conversation...bottompost!  If it is hard to
hold the parts together and still see the whole...bottompost!



As I've said before, I prefer
bottom-posting...less chaotic.



Now, on to issue 2.  I have personally put cropping to good
use.



Issue 3. Ditto the creative and
playful mentions above.
It depends on what you are doing. Or
to use an analogy: which is better, a Kawasaki or a Cessna?


Issues 4,5,6,7,8. I agree
wholeheartedly.


Issue 9: The rule isn't well known to
me. Makes sense, though. I recall (dimly) reading somewhere, years
ago, that the ideal width for readability is something like 30 or 35
characters. Newspaper columns, maybe?



Issue 10: (see 9.) I sometimes hard
wrap to a fairly narrow width if it appears that the person with whom
I am exchanging messages is having trouble making it fit.



Bonus Issue: Here's another hint. If
you don't want to waste your time dealing with such junk, tell the
sender. Try to find a tactful way to do it, because, many people
will be hurt to hear that their fun is your bane. I try to do the
same, but, it usually takes months for a situation to present itself
in such a way that I can brooch the subject tenderly. And even then,
I suspect that I might come off as arrogant or unfeeling. This only
applies if the sender is someone you care about.

I'm one for top-posting.  In all my years of emailing, I've only ever come across one person who didn't top-post and found reading his emails extremely difficult.  It's certainly not quick, one has to peruse the whole conversation to see if a comment has been added.  It's ridiculous.  Top-posting is most efficient, though I must admit, it can be difficult following a conversation at times if the reply is a one worded message referring to point 3 of my email.

This is absurd. For generations medical charts and legal files and case-worker files have been organized with the oldest stuff on the BOTTOM. It is a short-sited person who can't see any value in this. Who wants to rifle through all that stuff to see where the most recent entry begins. Maybe you should sort your inbox with the most recent stuff on the bottom.

First off, I posted a short follow-up to some of this discussion in a separate blog entry . Basically, I'm responding there to all these ridiculous small-picture complaints about cropping as it relates to top-posting. What a waste of bandwidth it is to resend megabytes upon kilobytes of text that has already been sent back and forth a dozen times, all to justify top-posting. If you have to "peruse the entire discussion" or "scroll past the entire discussion" to find the reply, you're doing it wrong.
Secondly, kmatthia suggests I have my email client list most recent emails last rather than first. Um, I do. That is, in fact, the default with the mail user agent I'm using (mutt). It works beautifully. Thanks for the suggestion, though. Of course, I'm not sure you suggested it. Are you trying to make a point about it being hard to find the most recent? See, it's not difficult at all, because I'm using a computer, not a stack of papers . Your points about hardcopy-based record keeping don't apply here. A computer can default to showing you any part of the stack you like first, rather than always starting only at the top. Mine defaults to showing me the "bottom" of the list, where the new stuff has been placed as it arrived. Thus, I get an intuitive top-down progression, and I get to see the most recent stuff when I open my MUA. In fact, it's even better than that: if I have new stuff that fills up more than one screen, it starts by showing me the oldest of the new stuff first so that I will be able to get caught up on context for lengthy exchanges without having to scroll through the list (or flip pages, if this were hardcopy) to find a starting-point after the last thing I'd seen. See how great the digital age can be? Don't limit my efficiency and productivity with inapplicable meatspace data management models that actually slow things down in a cyberspace context. If that's not what you meant, though, I'd like you to tell me what you did mean.
There are rare instances where a top-posted comment is actually a good idea, even discarding for the moment the hell of rearranging a discussion where others have top-posted: a couple of you have made the point that bottom-posting may be the best in almost all cases, but top-posting actually makes sense once in a while. You're right. I chose to avoid mentioning it to keep things a touch simpler and less confusing, and to cut down on the number of people who would take that as carte blanche to top-post without cropping in every instance. Really, top-posting is something one should consider doing when one is steeped enough in bottom-posting wisdom to know the difference between an efficient top-post and mere bending to the weight of peer pressure and the like.
LaFong made the point that hard linewraps are "only necessary if you insist upon plain text email and crummy email clients." Actually, it's necessary if you A) want to keep things more readable (wider paragraphs are harder to read, experimentally validated in psych studies around the same time that it was determined green-on-black was easier to read than white-on-black or black-on-white for monochrome monitors) and B) don't want to be an inconsiderate prick to other people who have crummy email clients. I have an excellent email client that does dynamic line-wraps when needed, and I still prefer hard line-breaks for better readability. In fact, my client will leave other people's stuff unwrapped so that their (often asinine) lack of structure in email is undisturbed in case it might actually be desirable in this case to have longer lines, even while it imposes hard linewraps on my own text for me -- but I can extend it beyond 80 characters any time I want to when composing my own emails if I really want to. I prefer flexibility with a default to something sane and courteous over rigid adherence to an inconsiderate and unstructured "norm".
LaFong also seems to be unaware that even in the US, not only are there many people not using broadband, but the majority of Internet users are still on dialup . There's that self-centered "I got mine" attitude toward email again. Oh, and since the ISP is paying per unit of bandwidth and a bunch of 30MB emails would increase that bandwidth significantly when measured across its entire customer base, 5MB limits on email/attachment sizes makes perfect sense to me. Let me know if you start an ISP, LaFong, so I can avoid it: I don't want to get suckered into using an ISP run by someone with such a short-sighted, business-crippled view of technology as yours, and have it disappear from under me.
LaFong again: I don't tend to go around correcting others' spelling in emails with my little red pen. I just wince at the bad spelling, ignore the email if it's too bad to be able to read (or send a brief note to please rewrite it so it's readable, in rare cases where it's important enough to bother), and move on. The fact I mentioned it here doesn't mean I'm going around correcting people's spelling.
This is getting old. I'm going to stop this reply before it gets too long and go do something useful rather than try to force horses to drink water once they've been led to it.

kmatthia said,

? For generations medical charts
and legal files and case-worker files have been organized with the
oldest stuff on the BOTTOM. ?



With something that carries that much
potential for being out of date, I agree with the filo
arrangement. I don't want to rifle through all that stuff, either.
However, it is not a box of files we are talking about. We're
talking about logs of conversations, like the minutes of a meeting.
Said minutes are invariably fifo. Most
message threads run dry in a few days and the clutter of historical
irrelevance is irrelevant.



? Maybe you should sort your inbox
with the most recent stuff on the bottom.?


As a matter of
fact, I do. It works fine for me, but, I also rearrange it when the
need arises.

Bottom posting might be cultured, but in most all cases top posting wins in speed and clarity in communicating what is the most important thing that you want the other person (or people) to know.
TV newscasters don't tell you everything about the war in Iraq before revealing the important new piece of information for that particular day (wouldn't that be an exciting newscast to watch?) so, why would anyone place history in front of the important new information you need to communicate?
I guess it's a choice of creating a message that is one of two things:   A verbose journal of record (which might be needed in rare cases like when a delicate legal issue is involved), or an efficient piece of clear communication.  I'll go with the one that will help the reco[oemt finish faster and with more confidence because they've avoided those moments (or minutes) needed to find the new info in a bottom poster's message.
I would make one suggestion to those who need to communicate a lot of detail in a message:  Consider using bullet points.  Important details can get lost in paragraphs like those I've typed so far.

But, if you put one idea here
And the followup idea here
And, your most important idea here
... whoever has to turn those ideas into reality will have likely have better followthrough.  In fact, I bet I would have better retention of the "10 e-mail Commandments" if you had first provided them as bullet points and then followed up with the details.
In today's short-attention-span world those bullet points would be a visual cue to slow down, focus and read.  A sea of letters, words and paragraphs might be complete in content, but can end up being completely worthless if no one reads it.

Here's a clear example of why context is important: rickk didn't check context, so he doesn't know that I (and others) have, in many ways and several times, already addressed the matters he brings up. I'll repeat, with emphasis and in summary form, some of the high points:

Clarity suffers when you're reading stuff in reversed order. If you have to check context, and it's in reversed order, things can get very difficult to understand, and there ends up being a lot of scrolling back-and-forth, as you scroll downward while reading something, then scroll upward to find the beginning of the next item in chronological order.
You need to crop stuff not immediately necessary. Crop out the materials that don't provide necessary context. If people don't need to read three hundred lines of discussion history to understand what you're saying, don't send it . If there are a handful of lines, say perhaps six of them, of discussion history that is necessary to understanding your message, then they should be reading it anyway , and posting below it is a good idea .
If you want a journal of record, save your emails. Expecting the other guy to always send back unedited discussion history in its entirety is a crappy way to maintain a record of the discussion, and prone to failures.

I am a top poster, will always be a top poster and that is that. I don't want to wade through all the previous conversation just to get to what I'm after to begin with...the reply to my e-mail. After all, I have already read the previous conversation and already know what the main topic is. The only way I will do it another way is if whomever I am working for prefers it done another way. Then I will do it THEIR way. THEY pay my  bills so it is THEIR perogative to dictate how things are done within their own organization.
Like it or not, top posting is the way it has been done for decades and what 'reason' is there to change something THAT DOES WORK and has worked for all those decades. In all those decades, if there was something found to be REALLY wrong with it changes would have been made THEN! Why is it that only now someone wants to upset the status quo simply over a "preference"?
Another "like it or not" is that Microsoft has been able through "their means" to keep practically a steel trap monopoly going with their software. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2496&tag=nl.e539  How many "package computers" come with anything but Windoze installed on them? Yes, you can install your own preferential programs on them but that doesn't change the fact that M$ Windoze is the majority and it's code is written to TOP POST. K.I.S.S!!! THAT is why the MAJORITY of other e-mail programs default to top posting. No rocket science there.
That being said, this blog TOTALLY left out MY personal biggest e-mail peaves: Forwards that have lists and lists (and lists...) of e-mail addresses of people I don't know. Even a BIGGER peave I have is having someone send a composition and/or forward SENDING MY e-mail address to all kinds of people I do not know = INVASION of my privacy...just a little? Think about that one for at least 10 seconds.
Yes, SOME changes CAN be good. This one seems only to create more confusion. So why just roll over and attempt to change something simply for the sake of change based on personal preferences and NOT for RATIONAL REASONS that actually improve the way things work???
PLEASE refer to the PARAGRAPHS referenced by the response below as you read that response. You should then get the TRUE context of the points I was attempting to make ...without the twisted 'editing'.
BTW: I DID in deed READ the entire BLOG. I simply agree with the MAJORITY of responders on this board.

Get your geek girl a t-shirt. She'll love it, I promise. Well, she'll love it if she has any taste. Here's an image.
For those of you too lazy to click the link, here's a smaller image:

Also for those too lazy to click the link, it says "Linux is like a bad boyfriend: It never goes down on you."
Here's where to buy it: Apotheonic Labs swag shop .

My wife wouldn't appreciate it -- because I'm more like Windows!

I'm stunned by the number of people who feel it incumbent upon them to defend top-posting in emails because they don't want to scroll down through the whole discussion thread. Did you miss the point about cropping?
I'm stunned by the (slightly smaller) number of people who feel it incumbent upon them to defend the practice of not cropping because they might want an audit trail. Are you unaware that you don't have to delete every email you recieve immediately after opening it? What kind of audit trail are you going to have if the guy sending you a reply can just edit the quoted text anyway?
anyway.
something like this,
read emails that are ordered
anyone would want to
I find it hard to believe

C'mon, that's a lousy example and you know it.  No one wants to read AN INDIVIDUAL POSTING ordered like that.  Now you're just being silly.Everybody agreed with everything you said except on this one issue.  What qualified us as dense, finding top posting convenient or disagreeing with you?  We aren't all rickk.

How Yodaesque!  Or would that be Yodistic.

Everyone I work with top-posts. I'm not sure I've ever seen it done differently in office e-mail. Outlook even sets up your outgoing e-mail that way. Cropping is fine if a discussion goes more than two rounds. But if there are a large number of recipients for whom the most recent posting is not relevant, then when a relevant one does come along they may need to scroll down to catch up on the details of what it's referring to.
I do personal e-mail differently, interspersing my comments with the original so that mine are directly beneath what I'm referring to. I never have a chain of correspondence with more than one person so I always crop, even though that is inconvenient because I have to do it one paragraph at a time.
Some BBS's--with more complex engines than TR--set you up for bottom posting by quoting the original message on top. That makes sense because anyone (including the original poster) who sees it won't know what you're talking about unless they read the original first.

What is a top post, is putting the body of the mail into the subject?

So, if I understand you correctly, anyone who does not agree with your opinion is dense. You are also stunned that (a large number of?) others would defend their opinions instead of agreeing with you.

Top posting is replying to an e-mail, with the client placing the previous message below the top line of your reply.  If you wanted to recap the entire thread, you would need to read from bottom up.
While I prefer to leave the aforementioned audit trail, I often edit the quoted header and sig lines...
 

Why is this a big deal anyway, don't we all, as IT perfessionals, have much bigger and better things to worry about then where the text is posted in a message?  I don't think I have ever seen an e-mail client post to the bottom accept the "open source" clients that don't conform to the rest of the world anyway.  Can't we all just get along.....

It's a big time saver to have the reply to the message at the top of the e-mail for those of us who are busy.  Usually anyone who receives the e-mail has already been privy to the conversation past so why scroll through it if you don't have too?  Imagine a large team of people, say 300, having to do the same thing and the wasted time scrolling through text they have already read.  Multiply that by the thousands of times you do this in a year and that's a lot of wasted money and time.  Besides that, I don't think I have seen a mail client do anything but top-post accept for a few "open source" products.  Maybe I'm missing something.....

I see your point, but, for me, I still prefer top posting as long as everything is on subject.  As a courtesy, I will sometimes re-cap the situation and remove all off topic posts as well as remove the person that feels the need to reply with thanks to everything I send.
I can get over 100 emails a day, and I'm the Project Manager for several projects as well as having other roles in those same projects (interface eningeer, tester, grumpy person who become the "enforcer") and having that entire thread becomes essential for documentation purposes as well as reminding me who said what.  I don't necessarily have to always read the entire thread from the beginning, but just want to recap from the last email.
I'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

Prepair to be stunned some more.  = )

In business, I don't have TIME to track down a previous email to be
able to figure out what someone is going on about.  If the
previous message is there, I have all the information right at hand IF
I need it.

I will edit out anything that is not needed so the recipient has no doubt what it is I am replying to.

Another advantage of "top posting", if everything is right there, then I KNOW I have covered all the required topics. 

If there is a list of questions, I will even stick my answers IN their
old section, (changing the color of course) so it is a question-answer
and all points were covered.  (but I guess that isn't "top posting", huh?)

Sorry, your wrong!     = ]

Now MY pet peev is when I send someone an attachment, and it is still
attached when they reply to me.  Why would I want my own file
back??????

What stuns me is that this issue has your panties in such a bunch. My
advice...stop smoking crack and start smoking pot. Then these trival
issues won't bother you so much.

It's the dense that make top-posting necessary.  Most people in the business world will not go looking at previous e-mails, so if you just reply and don't top-post, they'll have no idea what you're talking about.  It's not pretty, but it is reality.

I *much* prefer inline responses. I'll enumerate my reasons in favor of
that format and my reasons against top-posting. Let me start with the
latter since so many here seem in favor of top-posting.

Reasons why top-posting is less than ideal:

When reading the reply, one must recall the context or scroll
away to find it. That is, when you read, "yes, that is what we ought to
be doing," one must find the antecedent for "that." If the mail thread
is not terribly recent, one is not likely to recall the antecedent. If
one is part of many separate threads, one is less likely to recall the
proper context, much less the antecedent.
Replies to multiple points in preceding messages are grouped in
one spot. The transition from one to the next is often jarring or
confusing. This also makes recognizing the context for each part of the
reply harder.
The quoting is often only readable by those using the same client
and formatting. A person preferring to use text only or mostly
text-based e-mail tools loses visual information that those using the
original client or format get. This makes visually separating the
messages in the thread harder.
Too much header and signature information is retained usually.
Few are actually willing to cut out old quoted material, so
messages grow ad infinitum. This makes them take longer to load,
increases demand on quotas, and increases demand on the local network
if not the Internet itself.

The following are the reasons I like inline responses. They are mostly the flip side of the points made against top-quoting.

The context, such as a previous writer's question, precedes the
response. Thus, one can read what was asked and then read the response
immediately thereafter. Since the original material is quoted, one can
often just read the unquoted material between the quoted text, but when
memory fails or confusion reigns, one can see the context directly.
Because the context is retained in situ, one can follow many more independent threads without confusion.
The reply to a given query or point follows each query or point,
so there's no confusion as to which part of the reply is in response to
which query or point made by the previous posters.
One is more likely to snip unwanted quoted material because the
reply is harder to spot otherwise. This reduces message sizes which
avoids the space and load problems top-posting causes. Granted,
overquoting can be a real detriment to inline responses.
This format is easily understood by text-based clients, too.

In short, I think inline quoting makes messages easier and faster to
read, makes keeping up with long running threads easier, and saves
resources. What could be better than that?

My guess is that many who claim to like top-quoting really don't have
experience with inline quoting or see so little of it that the mere
fact that it contrasts totally with what they perceive to be the norm
makes it appear the worse of the two approaches. In other words, it's a
"try it, you might like it" sort of thing.

First off, this "recap for the dense" was a follow-up to reply intelligently to email .
Some of you might be missing some context there. It's the fact that
this specific blog post got featured in TR newsletters that contributed
to this misunderstanding, I'm afraid, since I wasn't expecting that to
happen and as such didn't specifically reference the previous post.
Second: What qualified people as dense is, simply, persisting in the same arguments without modification even after I've addressed those arguments ,
in some cases before those arguments were made in the first place. It's
not the fact that you want an archive of previous discussion that makes
you dense ? it's the fact that you ignore the fact that an archive
already exists if you save your emails. It's not the fact that you
don't want to "scroll through the whole discussion" that makes you
dense ? it's the fact that you ignore the appropriateness of cropping.
Et cetera.
Third: I don't care if everyone with whom you work top-posts. That
doesn't make it "better". Should I repeat your mother's admonition
about your friends jumping off a bridge?
Fourth: If you say something like "if I understand you correctly,
anyone who does not agree with your opinion is dense," you clearly do not understand me correctly .
Fifth: Being busy isn't much of an excuse. Someone mentioned getting
over 100 emails every day. I tend to have over 100 emails by breakfast.
The answer? Three words: crop crop crop . Okay, so it's one word
repeated three times. I've been saying it over and over and over again,
though, and nobody seems to get it.
Sixth: If you want context, you don't have to crop out everything . Just crop out the stuff that doesn't contribute to needed understanding of context . If something is needed ,
the reader should darned well be encouraged to read it anyway, so
forcing the lazy bastards to scroll past the three lines of
cropped-down context isn't a problem in any case. Are we cluing in yet?
Seventh: "In-line" or "interleaved" posting makes great sense
sometimes. I use it fairly regularly. Some things to think about:
Top-posting and interleaved posting in the same discussion looks
confusing, while bottom-posting and interleaved posting in the same discussion does not.
Top-posting and bottom-posting in the same discussion looks confusing
as well. Guess who the "odd man out" is. Also: When you use the same
sort of response tactics as those in interleaved posting on a message
that is one short paragraph in length and contains only one main idea,
or when there's only one idea to which you need to respond and you
decide to crop the extraneous stuff like a good little soldier, the
result looks amazingly like bottom-posting. Go figure. In many ways,
interleaved posting and bottom-posting are the same thing, as long as
you're not Steven S. Warren (who I once saw actually do interleaved
posting in a blog discussion where he unbelievably placed his responses
above the cropped sections to which they responded ? it was almost
impossible to read).