Federico Pistono

If you are using an email program, be it a Web interface or a client-side application, you are likely to have it configured it to answer in top-posting by default.

This is madness.

I'll illustrate it with an example, I'm sure you can figure out why it doesn't make sense.

The madness

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.

Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

A: Top-posting.

Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

This widespread policy in business communication made bottom and inline posting so unknown among most users that some of the most popular email programs no longer support the traditional posting style. For example Microsoft Outlook, AOL, and Yahoo! make it difficult or impossible to indicate which part of a message is the quoted original or do not let users insert comments between parts of the original.

Yahoo! does not have the option "Quote the text of the original message" in Mail Classic, but this setting is retained after turning it on in All-New Mail and then switching back to Mail Classic. Inline replying is broken in Microsoft Outlook, which despite choosing the setting to prefix each line of the original with the "greater-than" character (>) produces a blue line that makes answers inserted between quotes of an HTML email look like part of the original. The only workaround is to use the setting "read all standard mail in plain text".

The logical solution: bottom posting

In the "bottom-posting" style, the reply is appended to a full or partial copy of the original message. The name bottom-posting is sometimes used for inline-style replies, and indeed the two formats are the same when only one point is being replied to.

At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:

> At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote:

>> I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
>> minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates
>> and important fixes.

> Whoa! Hold on. I have a job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out
> a report to key tech staff. Could you push it back an hour?
>
> By the way, which systems will be updated? I had some network
> problems after last week's update. Will I have to reboot?

No problems. 6pm it is then.

Basically, I will update our WWW server and firewall.
No, you won't have to reboot.

Bottom-posting, like inline replies, encourages posters to trim the original message as much as possible, so that readers are not forced to scroll past irrelevant text, or text that they have already seen in the original message:

At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:

> Could you push it back an hour?
> [...] which systems will be updated?
> [...] Will I have to reboot?

No problems. 6pm it is then.
Basically, I will update our WWW server and firewall.
No, you won't have to reboot.

This practice is well known among programmers, Linux User Groups, bulletin boards, mailing lists, USENET, and some internet forums, but most people are completely unaware of why it matters and how it's important.

Tools you can use

You can google your email client + bottom posting to see how you can configure your system.
If you use Firefox and Gmail, there is a greasemonkey script that does the job for you.

Final remarks

Please, spread the word and do the right thing, for a saner Web. ;)

More information on posting style on Wikipedia.