Very few people care about the whole conversation... So the obvious thing to do would be quoting nothing, unless you specifically tell the mail client to inclu

Very few people care about the whole conversation... So the obvious thing to do would be quoting nothing, unless you specifically tell the mail client to include quotes. That would prevent the useless snowballing. Selective quoting is a way to enhance communication by providing context. If you aren't going to bother, there's no reason to include the garbage. When it was a hot topic, there was a very tangible problem for mail lists in which some members were on dial-up in countries with terrible communications. Not trimming quotes was disrespectful to them so most lists had rules about it. Now it seems there is enough bandwidth everywhere, the only issue is that all that quotes are just useless, a cruft from a questionable decision of the authors of Outlook. Everything related to bottom posting is a strange hobby. In my experience, people that has been recently introduced to email are oblivious to quoting styles. The hostility comes from those who ignored the rules of some community and were scolded for it.