Either you're part of an active email chain (e.g. happening over a period of a few hours), in which case you have the context. You don't need to read it over an

Either you're part of an active email chain (e.g. happening over a period of a few hours), in which case you have the context. You don't need to read it over and over again, so the best place to put it is below the signature. Top posting wins here. Or you're catching up on a discussion that happened in the past, reading each email one after the other. Again, the context is secondary, so the best place is to put it below the signature. Again, top posting wins. For these rare emails where specific answers need to be positioned below some specific context, the writer of the email needs to have the discipline to put it there, and this can be achieved with top posting as well. Inline quoting has really no good reason to exist in most email chains.