Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

Bottom posting is also good for people who might have missed a message in the thread. For example, I sometimes see messages incorrectly classified as spam, and it is really annoying to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of an email just to see what I missed.

It is also annoying to deal with people who never remove quotes they are not replying to. Bottom posting encourages the removal of quotes beyond a certain level; people who top post routinely ignore the quoted text.

I guess the point of the article is not that bottom posting should die, but that quoting messages at all should die. Remove quoted text or make it optional, and the bottom/top posting argument goes away entirely. If you assume everyone receives all messages anyway, what is the point of quoting?

(Edit: Personally, I would rather not give up quoting, because messages may be lost and I would like to see whatever context I missed. It is also nice to see the context of a reply; "That is a bad idea!" could refer to anything in a message, bottom posting helps to clear it up.)

> Bottom posting is also good for people who might have missed a message in the thread.

But it's worse for people who have been diligently following the email discussion the whole time. "Hey, could you repeat that first bit again and again and again? Yup!"

I also don't like to delete old context, because a late email could eventually get forwarded to a new party, in which case having the complete context is an advantage.

In summary: I assume the common case is that a few people with normal memories are reading the mail, and I can just cut to the chase by top-posting my reply. But I preserve the old stuff at the bottom for the rare but important case of new participants.

P.S. I realize that I'm bottom posting my reply.

I also don't like to delete old context, because a late email could eventually get forwarded to a new party, in which case having the complete context is an advantage.

A proper mail client will be fully capable of forwarding the full thread (or any relevant portion) to another user. Whose proper email client will be capable of interpreting the attachment as threaded email and displaying it properly.

How often have you done this? How often does it work? What fraction of people you communicate with are using sufficiently proper mail clients?

In technologically-oriented communities, fairly often. In others, not so much.

Had an interesting situation with a legal case a few years back, much of which revolved around email evidence. Using standard Unix tools, cutting through, searching, organizing, and categorizing a large volume (thousands) of emails was fairly straightforward. Working with a legal team who had access only to conventional Windows products was ... maddening. Turns out, of course, that only a very small handful of documents were ultimately relevant to the court presentation, but understanding the context in selecting and presenting those was greatly assisted by being able to effectively process far more.

Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi". Plus, top-posters are the ones most likely to not include In-Reply-To headers.

"Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi"."

Agreed, see my edit; I would rather not see quoting go the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, top-posting discourages quoting entirely; the quoted text just piles up at the bottom of the message, easily turning into hundreds of kilobytes of text, until someone is kind enough to delete it (usually a bottom-posting sort of person).

"Plus, top-posters are the ones most likely to not include In-Reply-To headers."

Shouldn't that be done automatically by one's email client?

Outlook at least used to be a big offender in not including those headers.

Blackberry too, and I suspect a few webmail clients.

Edit your quotes. We don't need to (re)read the whole thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com